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^Edition ftc ^uxc 

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be limited to Five Hundred Copies^ of which this is 



No. 



GEBRIE and COMPANY. 



President. 




Secretary. 



2 Far Wiib/ 



By 



. J T . ^ ► f 1 . • LJ r ft 



Heralding tlit' Sunrise. 



UNIFORM EDITION 



RANCH LIFE AND 
THE HUNTING-TRAIL 

An Account of Life in the Cattle Country 
OF the Far West 



By 

THEODORE ROOSEVELT 



PHILADELPHIA 

GEBBIE AND COMPANY 
1903 



THE LIBRARY OF 
CONGRESS, 

Two Copies Received 

NOV 19 1903 

Copyright Entry 
CLASS (X XXa No. 
I copy U 






yd to 



Copyright, i888 
Copyright, 1903 

by 

THE CENTURY COMPANY 



This edition of "Ranch Life and the Hunting-Trail" is issued 
under special arrangement with The Century Company 



"Oh, our manhood's prime vigor! No spirit feels waste, 

Not a muscle is stopped in its playing nor sinew unbraced. 

Oh, the wild joys of living! the leaping from rock up to rock. 

The strong rending of boughs from the fir-tree, the cool silver 

shock 

Of the plunge in a pool's living water, the hunt of the bear, . . . 

And the sleep in the dried river-channel where bulrushes tell 

That the water was wont to go warbling so softly and well. 

How good is man's life, the mere living." 

Browning. 



lu 



CONTENTS 



CHAPTER I 
The Cattle Country of the Far West i 



CHAPTER II 
Out on the Range 22 

CHAPTER III 
The Home Ranch 38 

CHAPTER IV 
The Round-Up 68 

CHAPTER V 
Winter Weather no 

CHAPTER VI 
Frontier Types 122 

CHAPTER VII 
Red and White on the Border 155 

CHAPTER VIII 
Sheriff's Work on a Ranch 169 

CHAPTER IX 
The Ranchman's Rifle on Crag and Prairie 200 



V 



vi Contents 

CHAPTER X PAGE 

The Wapiti, or Round-Horned Elk 226 

CHAPTER Xr 
The Big-Horn Sheep 236 

CHAPTER XII 
The Game of the High Peaks: The White Goat. . . . 271 



ILLUSTRATIONS 



Heralding the Sunrise . . Frontispiece 

Roping in a Horse-Corral .... 42 

Line Riding in Winter 112 

A Row IN Cattle Town ..... 146 
From original drawings by Frederick Remington 



vu 



RANCH LIFE AND THE 
HUNTING TRAIL 



CHAPTER I. 

THE CATTLE COUNTRY OF THE FAR "WEST, 

THE great grazing lands of the West lie in 
what is known as the arid belt, which 
stretches from British America on the 
north to Mexico on the south, through the mid- 
dle of the United States, It includes New Mex- 
ico, part of Arizona, Colorado, Wyoming, ]\Iontana, 
and the western portion of Texas, Kansas, Ne- 
braska, and Dakota. It must not be understood 
by this that more cattle are to be found here than 
elsewhere, for the contrar}^ is true, it being a fact 
often lost sight of that the number of cattle raised 
on the small, thick-lying farms of the fertile East- 
em States is actually many times greater than 
that of those scattered over the vast, barren 
ranches of the far West ; for stock will always be 
most plentiful in districts where com and other 
winter food can be grown. But in this arid belt, 



2 Ranch Life 

and in this arid belt only, — save in a few similar 
tracts on the Pacific slope, — stock-raising is 
almost the sole industry, except in the moimtain 
districts where there is mining. The whole region 
is one vast stretch of grazing cotintry, with only 
here and there spots of farm-land, in most places 
there being nothing more like agriculture than 
is implied in the cutting of some tons of wild hay 
or the planting of a garden patch for home use. 
This is especially true of the northern portion of 
the region, which comprises the basin of the Upper 
Missouri, and with which alone I am familiar. 
Here there are no fences to speak of, and all the 
land north of the Black Hills and the Big Horn 
Mountains and between the Rockies and the 
Dakota wheat-fields might be spoken of as one 
gigantic, imbroken pasture, where cowboys and 
branding-irons take the place of fences. 

The country throughout this great Upper Mis- 
souri basin has a wonderful sameness of character ; 
and the rest of the arid belt, lying to the south- 
ward, is closely akin to it in its main features. 
A traveler seeing it for the first time is especially 
struck by its look of parched, barren desolation ; 
he can with difficulty believe that it will support 
cattle at all. It is a region of light rainfall ; the 
grass is short and comparatively scanty; there 
is no timber except along the beds of the streams, 
and in many places there are alkali deserts where 



The Cattle Country 3 

nothing grows but sage-brush and cactus. Now 
the land stretches out into level, seemingly end- 
less plains or into rolling prairies; again it is 
broken by abrupt hills and deep, winding valleys ; 
or else it is crossed by chains of buttes, usually 
bare, but often clad with a dense growth of 
dwarfed pines or gnarled, stunted cedars. The 
muddy rivers run in broad, shallow beds, which 
after hea\y rainfalls are filled to the brim by the 
swollen torrents, while in droughts the larger 
streams dwindle into sluggish trickles of clearer 
water, and the smaller ones dry up entirely, save 
in occasional deep pools. 

All through the region, except on the great 
Indian reservations, there has been a scanty and 
sparse settlement, quite peculiar in its character. 
In the forest the woodchopper comes first ; on the 
fertile prairies the granger is the pioneer ; but on 
the long, stretching uplands of the far West it is 
the men who guard and follow the homed herds 
that prepare the way for the settlers who come 
after. The high plains of the Upper Missouri and 
its tributary rivers were first opened, and are still 
held, by the stockmen, and the whole civilization 
of the region has received the stamp of their 
marked and individual characteristics. They 
were from the South, not from the East, although 
many men from the latter region came out 
along the great transcontinental railway lines 



4 Ranch Life 

and joined them in their northern migration. 
They are not dwellers in towns, and from the 
nature of their industry lived as far apart from 
each other as possible. In choosing new ranges, 
old cow-hands, who are also seasoned plainsmen, 
are invariably sent ahead, perhaps a year in ad- 
vance, to spy out the land and pick the best places. 
One of these may go by himself, or more often, 
especially if they have to penetrate little known 
or entirely unknown tracts, two or three will go 
together, the owner or manager of the herd him- 
self being one of them. Perhaps their herds may 
already be on the border of the wild and imin- 
habited country: in that case they may have to 
take but a few days' journey before finding the 
stretches of sheltered, long-grass land that they 
seek. For instance, when I wished to move my own 
elkhom steer brand on to a new ranch I had to 
spend barely a week in traveling north among the 
Little Missouri Bad Lands before finding what 
was then untrodden ground far outside the range 
of any of my neighbors' cattle. But if a large 
outfit is going to shift its quarters it must go much 
farther; and both the necessity and the chance 
for long wanderings were especially great when 
the final overthrow of the northern Horse Indians 
opened the whole Upper Missouri basin at one 
sweep to the stockmen. Then the advance- 
guards or explorers, each on one horse and lead- 



The Cattle Country 5 

ing another with food and bedding, were often 
absent months at a time, threading their way- 
through the trackless wastes of plain, plateau, 
and river-bottom. If possible they would choose 
a coimtry that would be good for winter and 
summer alike ; but often this could not be done, 
and then they would try to find a well-watered 
tract on which the cattle could be summered, and 
from which they could be driven in fall to their 
sheltered winter range — for the cattle in winter 
eat snow, and an entirely waterless region, if 
broken, and with good pasturage, is often the best 
possible winter ground, as it is sure not to have 
been eaten off at all during the summer; while 
in the bottoms the grass is always cropped down 
soonest. Many outfits regularly shift their herds 
every spring and fall; but with us in the Bad 
Lands all we do, when cold weather sets in, is to 
drive our beasts off the scantily grassed river- 
bottom back ten miles or more among the broken 
buttes and plateaus of the uplands to where the 
brown hay, cured on the stalk, stands thick in the 
winding coulees. 

These lookouts or forerunners having returned, 
the herds are set in motion as early in the spring 
as may be, so as to get on the ground in time to 
let the travel-worn beasts rest and gain flesh 
before winter sets in. Each herd is accompanied 
by a dozen, or a score, or a couple of score, of 



6 Ranch Life 

cowboys, according to its size, and beside it 
rumble and jolt the heavy four-horse wagons 
that hold the food and bedding of the men and 
the few implements they will need at the end of 
their journey. As long as possible they follow 
the trails made by the herds that have already 
traveled in the same direction, and when these 
end they strike out for themselves. In the Upper 
Missouri basin, the pioneer herds soon had to 
scatter out and each find its own way among the 
great dreary solitudes, creeping carefully along 
so that the cattle should not be overdriven and 
should have water at the halting-places. An 
outfit might thus be months on its lonely journey, 
slowly making its way over melancholy, pathless 
plains, or down the valleys of the lonely rivers. 
It was tedious, harassing work, as the weary 
cattle had to be driven carefully and quietly 
during the day and strictly guarded at night, 
with a perpetual watch kept for Indians or white 
horse-thieves. Often they would skirt the edges 
of the streams for days at a time, seeking for a 
ford or a good swimming crossing, and if the 
water was up and the quicksand deep the danger 
to the riders was serious and the risk of loss among 
the cattle very great. 

At last, after days of excitement and danger 
and after months of weary, monotonous toil, the 
chosen ground is reached and the final camp 



The Cattle Country 7 

pitched. The footsore animals are turned loose 
to shift for themselves, outlying camps of two or 
three men each being established to hem them in. 
Meanwhile the primitive ranch-house, out-build- 
ings, and corrals are built, the unhewn cotton- 
wood logs being chinked mth moss and mud, 
while the roofs are of branches covered with dirt, 
spades and axes being the only tools needed for 
the work. Bunks, chairs, and tables are all home- 
made, and as rough as the houses they are in. 
The supplies of coarse, rude food are carried per- 
haps two or three hundred miles from the nearest 
town, either in the ranch-wagons or else by some 
regular freighting outfit, the huge canvas-topped 
prairie schooners of which are each drawn by 
several yoke of oxen, or perhaps by six or eight 
mules. To guard against the numerous mishaps 
of prairie travel, two or three of these prairie 
schooners usually go together, the brawny team- 
sters, known either as "bull-whackers" or as 
"mule-skinners," stalking beside their slow-mov- 
ing teams. 

The small outlying camps are often tents, or 
mere dug-outs in the ground. But at the main 
ranch there will be a cluster of log buildings, 
including a separate cabin for the foreman or 
ranchman; often another in which to cook and 
eat ; a long house for the men to sleep in ; stables, 
sheds, a blacksmith's shop, etc., — the whole 



8 Ranch Life 

group forming quite a little settlement, with the 
corrals, the stacks of natural hay, and the patches 
of fenced land for gardens or horse pastures. This 
little settlement may be situated right out in the 
treeless, nearly level open, but much more often 
is placed in the partly wooded bottom of a creek 
or river, sheltered by the usual backgroimd of 
somber brown hills. 

When the northern plains began to be settled, 
such a ranch would at first be absolutely alone 
in the wilderness, but others of the same sort 
were sure soon to be established within twenty 
or thirty miles on one side or the other. The 
lives of the men in such places were strangely 
cut off from the outside world, and, indeed, the 
same is true to a hardly less extent at the present 
day. Sometimes the wagons are sent for pro- 
visions, and the beef-steers are at stated times 
driven off for shipment. Parties of himters and 
trappers call now and then. More rarely small 
bands of emigrants go by in search of new homes, 
impelled by the restless, aimless craving for change 
so deeply grafted in the breast of the American 
borderer: the white-topped wagons are loaded 
with domestic goods, with sallow, dispirited- 
looking women, and with tow-headed children; 
while the gaimt, moody frontiersmen slouch along- 
side, rifle on shoulder, lank, homely, uncouth, and 
yet with a curious suggestion of grim strength 



The Cattle Country 9 

underlying it all. Or cowboys from neighboring 
ranches will ride over, looking for lost horses, or 
seeing if their cattle have strayed off the range. 
But this is all. Civilization seems as remote as 
if we were living in an age long past. The whole 
existence is patriarchal in character: it is the life 
of men who live in the open, who tend their herds 
on horseback, who go armed and ready to guard 
their lives by their own prowess, whose wants are 
very simple, and who call no man master. Ranch- 
ing is an occupation like those of vigorous, primi- 
tive pastoral peoples, having little in common with 
the humdrum, workaday business world of the 
nineteenth century ; and the free ranchman in his 
manner of life shows more kinship to an Arab 
sheik than to a sleek city merchant or tradesman. 
By degrees the country becomes what in a 
stock-raising region passes for well settled. In 
addition to the great ranches smaller ones are 
established, with a few himdred, or even a few 
score, head of cattle apiece; and now and then 
miserable farmers straggle in to fight a losing and 
desperate battle with drought, cold, and grass- 
hoppers. The wheels of the heavy wagons, 
driven always over the same course from one 
ranch to another, or to the remote frontier towns 
from which they get their goods, wear ruts in the 
soil, and roads are soon formed, perhaps originally 
following the deep trails made by the vanished 



lo Ranch Life 

buffalo. These roads lead down the river-bot- 
toms or along the crests of the divides or else 
strike out fairly across the prairie, and a man 
may sometimes journey a hundred miles along 
one without coming to a house or a camp of any 
sort. If they lead to a shipping point whence the 
beeves are sent to market, the cattle, traveling 
in single file, will have worn many and deep paths 
on each side of the wheel-marks; and the roads 
between important places which are regularly 
used either by the United States Government, 
by stage-coach lines, or by freight teams become 
deeply worn landmarks — as, for instance, near 
us, the Deadwood and the old Fort Keogh trails. 

Cattle-ranching can only be carried on in its 
present form while the population is scanty ; and 
so in stock-raising regions, pure and simple, there 
are usually few towns, and these are almost always 
at the shipping points for cattle. But, on the 
other hand, wealthy cattlemen, like miners who 
have done well, always spend their money freely ; 
and accordingly towns like Denver, Cheyenne, and 
Helena, where these two classes are the most 
influential in the community, are far pleasanter 
places of residence than cities of five times their 
population in the exclusively agricultural States 
to the eastward. 

A true "cow town" is worth seeing, — such a 
one as Miles City, for instance, especially at the 



The Cattle Country n 

time of the annual meeting of the great Montana 
Stock-raisers' Association. Then the whole place 
is full to overflowing, the importance of the meet- 
ing and the fun of the attendant frolics, especially 
the horse-races, drawing from the surrounding 
ranch country many himdreds of men of every 
degree, from the rich stock-owner worth his mil- 
lions to the ordinary cowboy who works for forty 
dollars a month. It would be impossible to 
imagine a more typically American assemblage, 
for although there are alwavs a certain number 
of foreigners, usually English, Irish, or German, 
yet they have become completely Americanized; 
and on the whole it would be difficult to gather a 
finer body of men, in spite of their numerous short- 
comings. The ranch-owners differ more from 
each other than do the cowboys ; and the former 
certainly compare verv favorably with similar 
classes of capitalists in the East. Anything more 
foolish than the demagogic outcry against "cattle 
kings" it would be difficult to imagine. Indeed, 
there are very few businesses so absolutely legiti- 
mate as stock-raising and so beneficial to the 
nation at large; and a successful stock-grower 
must not only be shrewd, thrifty, patient, and 
enterprising, but he must also possess qualities 
of personal bravery, hardihood, and self-reliance 
to a degree not demanded in the least by any 
mercantile occupation in a community long 



12 Ranch Life 

settled. Stockmen are in the West the pioneers 
of civiHzation, and their daring and adventurous- 
ness make the after settlement of the region pos- 
sible. The whole country owes them a great debt. 

The most successful ranchmen are those, usually 
Southwestemers, who have been bred to the busi- 
ness and have grown up with it ; but many Eastern 
men, including not a few college graduates, have 
also done excellently by devoting their whole time 
and energy to their work, — although Easterners 
who invest their money in cattle without knowing 
anything of the business, or who trust all to their 
subordinates, are naturally enough likely to incur 
heavy losses. Stockmen are learning more and 
more to act together ; and certainly the meetings 
of their associations are conducted with a dignity 
and good sense that w^ould do credit to any parlia- 
mentary body. 

But the cowboys resemble one another much 
more and outsiders much less than is the case 
even with their employers, the ranchmen. A 
town in the cattle coimtry, when for some cause 
it is thronged with men from the neighborhood, 
always presents a picturesque sight. On the 
wooden sidewalks of the broad, dusty streets the 
men who ply the various industries known only 
to frontier existence jostle one another as they 
saunter to and fro or lounge lazily in front of the 
straggling, cheap-looking board houses. Htmters 



The Cattle Country 13 

come in from the plains and the mountains, clad 
in buckskin shirts and fur caps, greasy and un- 
kempt, but with resolute faces and sullen, watch- 
ful eyes, that are ever on the alert. The teamsters, 
surly and self-contained, wear slouch hats and 
great cowhide boots; while the stage-drivers, 
their faces seamed by the hardship and exposure 
of their long drives with every kind of team, 
through every kind of country, and in every kind 
of weather, proud of their really wonderful skill 
as reinsmen and conscious of their high standing 
in any frontier community, look down on and 
sneer at the "skin hunters" and the plodding 
drivers of the white-topped prairie schooners. 
Besides these there are trappers and wolfers, 
whose business is to poison wolves, with shaggy, 
knock-kneed ponies to carry their small bales 
and bundles of furs — beaver, wolf, fox, and occa- 
sionally otter; and silent sheep-herders, with 
cast-down faces, never able to forget the absolute 
solitude and monotony of their dreary lives, nor 
to rid their minds of the thought of the woolly 
idiots they pass all their days in tending. Such 
are the men who have come to town, either on 
business or else to frequent the flaunting saloons 
and gaudy hells of all kinds in search of the coarse, 
vicious excitement that in the minds of many of 
them does duty as pleasure — the only form of 
pleasure they have ever had a chance to know. 



14 Ranch Life 

Indians too, wrapped in blankets, with stolid, 
emotionless faces, stalk silently round among the 
whites, or join in the gambling and horse-racing. 
If the town is on the borders of the mountain 
coimtr}'-, there will also be sinewy lumbermen, 
rough-looking miners and packers, whose busi- 
ness it is to guide the long mule and pony trains 
that go where wagons cannot and whose work in 
packing needs special and peculiar skill; and 
mingled with and drawn from all these classes 
are desperadoes of every grade, from the gambler 
up through the horse-thief to the murderous pro- 
fessional bully, or, as he is locally called, "bad 
man" — now, however, a much less conspicuous 
object than formerly. 

But everywhere among these plainsmen and 
mountain-men, and more important than any, 
are the cowboys, — the men who follow the calling 
that has brought such towns into being. Singly, 
or in twos or threes, the}^ gallop their wiry little 
horses down the street, their lithe, supple figures 
erect or swaying slightly as they sit loosely in the 
saddle ; while their stirrups are so long that their 
knees are hardly bent, the bridles not taut enough 
to keep the chains from clanking. They are 
smaller and less muscular than the wielders of 
ax and pick; but they are as hardy and self- 
reliant as any men who ever breathed — with 
bronzed, set faces, and keen eyes that look all 



The Cattle Country 15 

the world straight in the face without flinching 
as they flash out from under the broad-brimmed 
hats. Peril and hardship, and years of long toil 
broken by weeks of brutal dissipation, draw 
haggard lines across their eager faces, but never 
dim their reckless eyes nor break their bearing of 
defiant self-confidence. They do not walk well, 
partly because they so rarely do any work out of 
the saddle, partly because their chaperajos or 
leather overalls hamper them when on the ground ; 
but their appearance is striking for all that, and 
pictiiresque too, with their jingling spurs, the big 
revolvers stuck in their belts, and bright silk 
handkerchiefs knotted loosely round their necks 
over the open collars of the flannel shirts. When 
drunk on the villainous whisky of the frontier 
to^vTLS, they cut mad antics, riding their horses 
into the saloons, firing their pistols right and left, 
from boisterous lightheartedness rather than from 
any viciousness, and indulging too often in deadly 
shooting affrays, brought on either by the acci- 
dental contact of the moment or on account of 
some long-standing grudge, or perhaps because 
of bad blood between two ranches or localities; 
but except while on such sprees they are quiet, 
rather self-contained men, perfectly frank and 
simple, and on their own groimd treat a stranger 
with the most whole-souled hospitahty, doing all 
in their power for him and scorning to take any 



i6 Ranch Life 

reward in return. Although prompt to resent an 
injury, they are not at all apt to be rude to out- 
siders, treating them with what can almost be 
called a grave courtesy. They are much better 
fellows and pleasanter companions than small 
farmers or agricultural laborers; nor are the 
mechanics and workmen of a great city to be 
mentioned in the same breath. 

The bulk of the cowboys themselves are South- 
westerners; but there are also many from the 
Eastern and the Northern States, who, if they 
begin yoimg, do quite as well as the Southerners. 
The best hands are fairly bred to the work and 
follow it from their youth up. Nothing can be 
more foolish than for an Easterner to think he 
can become a cowboy in a few months' time. 
]\Iany a yoimg fellow comes out hot with enthu- 
siasm for life on the plains, only to learn that his 
clumsiness is greater than he could have believed 
possible; that the cowboy business is like any 
other and has to be learned by serving a painful 
apprenticeship; and that this apprenticeship im- 
plies the endurance of rough fare, hard living, 
dirt, exposure of every kind, no little toil, and 
month after month of the dullest monotony. For 
cowboy work there is need of special traits and 
special training, and yoimg Easterners should be 
sure of themselves before trying it: the struggle 
for existence is very keen in the far West, and it 



The Cattle Country 17 

is no place for men who lack the ruder, coarser 
virtues and physical qualities, no matter how 
intellectual or how refined and delicate their 
sensibilities. Such are more likely to fail there 
than in older commimities. Probably during the 
past few years more than half of the young East- 
erners who have come West with a little money 
to learn the cattle business have failed signally 
and lost what they had in the beginning. The 
West, especially the far West, needs men who 
have been bred on the farm or in the workshop 
far more than it does clerks or college graduates. 

Some of the cowboys are jVIexicans, who gen- 
erally do the actual work well enough, but are not 
trustworthy ; moreover, they are always regarded 
with extreme disfavor by the Texans in an outfit, 
am.ong whom the intolerant caste spirit is very 
strong. Southern-bom whites will never work 
under them, and look down upon all colored or 
half-caste races. One spring I had with my 
wagon a Pueblo Indian, an excellent rider and 
roper, but a drunken, worthless, lazy devil; and 
in the summer of 1886 there were with us a Sioux 
half-breed, a quiet, hard-working, faithful fellow, 
and a mulatto, who was one of the best cow- 
hands in the whole round-up. 

Cowboys, like most Westerners, occasionally 
show remarkable versatility in their tastes and 
pursuits. One whom I know has abandoned his 



i8 Ranch Life 

regular occupation for the past nine months, 
during which time he has been in succession a 
bar-tender, a school-teacher, and a probate judge ! 
Another, whom I once employed for a short while, 
had passed through even more varied experiences, 
including those of a barber, a sailor, an apoth- 
ecary, and a buffalo-hunter. 

As a rule the cow-boys are known to each other 
only by their first names, with, perhaps, a prefix, 
the title of the brand for which they are working. 
Thus I remember once overhearing a casual re- 
mark to the effect that " Bar Y Harry" had mar- 
ried "the Seven Open A girl," the latter being the 
daughter of a neighboring ranchman. Often they 
receive nicknames, as, for instance, Dutch Wan- 
nigan. Windy Jack, and Kid Williams, all of 
whom are on the list of my personal acquaint- 
ances. 

No man traveling through or living in the 
country need fear molestation from the cowboys 
unless he himself accompanies them on their 
drinking-bouts, or in other ways plays the fool, 
for they are, w^ith us at any rate, very good fellows, 
and the most determined and effective foes of real 
law-breakers, such as horse and cattle thieves, 
murderers, etc. Few of the outrages quoted in 
Eastern papers as their handiwork are such in 
reality, the average Easterner apparently consid- 
ering every individual who wears a broad hat and 



The Cattle Country 19 

carries a six-shooter a cowboy. These outrages 
are, as a rule, the work of the roughs and criminals 
who always gather on the outskirts of civilization, 
and who infest every frontier town until the decent 
citizens become sufficiently numerous and deter- 
mined to take the law into their own hands and 
drive them out. The old buffalo-hunters, who 
formed a distinct class, became powerful forces 
for evil once they had destroyed the vast herds 
of mighty beasts the pursuit of which had been 
their means of livelihood. They were absolutely 
shiftless and improvident; they had no settled 
habits; they were inured to peril and hardship, 
but entirely unaccustomed to steady work; and 
so they afforded just the materials from which 
to make the bolder and more desperate kinds of 
criminals. When the game was gone they hung 
round the settlements for some little time, and 
then many of them naturally took to horse- 
stealing, cattle-killing, and highway robbery, 
although others, of course, went into honest pur- 
suits. They were men who died ofE rapidly, how- 
ever; for it is curious to see how many of these 
plainsmen, in spite of their iron nerves and thews, 
have their constitutions completely imdermined, 
as much by the terrible hardships they have en- 
dured as by the fits of prolonged and bestial revelry 
with which they have varied them. 

The "bad men," or professional fighters and 



20 



Ranch Life 



man-killers, are of a different stamp, quite a num- 
ber of them being, according to their light, per- 
fectly honest. These are the men who do most of 
the killing in frontier communities; yet it is a 
noteworthy fact that the men who are killed 
generally deserve their fate. These men are, of 
course, used to brawling, and are not only sure 
shots, but, what is equally important, able to 
"draw" their weapons with marv^elous quickness. 
They think nothing whatever of murder, and are 
the dread and terror of their associates ; yet they 
are very chary of taking the life of a man of good 
standing, and will often weaken and back douna 
at once if confronted fearlessly. With many of 
them their courage arises from confidence in their 
own powers and knowledge of the fear in which 
they are held; and men of this type often show 
the white feather when they get in a tight place. 
Others, however, will face any odds without 
flinching; and I have known of these men fight- 
ing, when mortally woimded, with a cool, ferocious 
despair that was terrible. As elsewhere, so here, 
very quiet men are often those who in an emer- 
gency show themselves best able to hold their own. 
These desperadoes always try to "get the drop" 
on a foe — that is, to take him at a disadvantage 
before he can use his own weapon. I have known 
more men killed in this way, when the affair was 
wholly one-sided, than I have known to be shot 



The Cattle Country 21 

in fair fight; and I have known fully as many 
who were shot by accident. It is wonderful, in 
the event of a street fight, how few bullets seem 
to hit the men they are aimed at. 

During the last two or three years the stock- 
men have imited to put down all these dangerous 
characters, often by the most summary exercise 
of lynch law. Notorious bullies and murderers 
have been taken out and himg, while the bands 
of horse and cattle thieves have been regularly 
hunted do\\Ti and destroyed in pitched fights by 
parties of armed cowboys ; and as a consequence 
most of our territory is now perfectly law-abiding. 
One such fight occurred north of me early last 
spring. The horse-thieves were overtaken on the 
banks of the Missouri ; two of their number were 
slain, and the others were driven on the ice, which 
broke, and two more were drowned. A few 
months previously another gang, whose head- 
quarters were near the Canadian line, were sur- 
prised in their hut ; two or three were shot down 
by the cowboys as they tried to come out, while 
the rest barricaded themselves in and fought until 
the great log-hut was set on fire, when they broke 
forth in a body, and nearly all were killed at once, 
only one or two making their escape. A little 
over two years ago one committee of vigilantes 
in eastern Montana shot or hung nearly sixty — • 
not, however, with the best judgment in all cases. 



CHAPTER II. 

OUT ON THE RANGE. 

A STRANGER in the Northwestern cattle 
country is especially struck by the resem- 
blance the settlers show in their pursuits 
and habits to the Southern people. Nebraska 
and Dakota, east of the Missouri, resemble Min- 
nesota and Iowa and the States farther east, but 
Montana and the Dakota cow country show more 
kinship with Texas; for while elsewhere in 
America settlement has advanced along the paral- 
lels of latitude, on the great plains it has followed 
the meridians of longitude and has gone northerly 
rather than westerly. The business is carried on 
as it is in the South. The rough-rider of the 
plains, the hero of rope and revolver, is first 
cousin to the backwoodsman of the southern 
Alleghanies, the man of the ax and the rifle; he 
is only a unique offshoot of the frontier stock of 
the Southwest. The very term "round-up" is 
used by the cowboys in the exact sense in which 
it is employed by the hill people and mountaineers 
of Kentucky, Tennessee, and North Carolina, 
with whom also labor is dear and poor land cheap, 
and whose few cattle are consequently branded 

33 



Out on the Range 23 

and turned loose in the woods exactly as is done 
with the great herds on the plains. 

But the ranching industry itself was copied 
from the Mexicans, of whose land and herds the 
Southwestern frontiersmen of Texas took forcible 
possession; and the traveler in the Northwest 
will see at a glance that the terms and practices 
of our business are largely of Spanish origin. 
The cruel curb-bit and hea\'y stock-saddle, with 
its high horn and cantle, prove that we have 
adopted Spanish -American horse-gear; and the 
broad hat, huge blimt spurs, and leather chap- 
erajos of the rider, as well as the corral in which 
the stock are penned, all alike show the same 
ancestry. Throughout the cattle coimtry east 
of the Rocky Mountains, from the Rio Grande to 
the Saskatchew^an, the same terms are in use and 
the same system is followed ; but on the Pacific 
slope, in California, there are certain small dif- 
ferences, even in nomenclature. Thus, we of the 
great plains all use the double cinch saddle, with 
one girth behind the horse's fore legs and another 
farther back, while Califomians prefer one with a 
single cinch, which seems to us much inferior for 
stock- work. Again, Califomians use the Spanish 
word "lasso," which with us has been entirely 
dropped, no plainsman with pretensions-^'to the 
title thinking of any word but "rope," either as 
noun or verb. 



24 Ranch Life 

The rope, whether leather lariat or made of 
grass, is the one essential feature of every cow- 
boy's equipment. Loosely coiled, it hangs from 
the horn or is tied to one side of the saddle in 
front of the thigh, and is used for every conceiv- 
able emergency, a twist being taken round the 
stout saddle-horn the second the noose settles 
over the neck or around the legs of a chased 
animal. In helping pull a wagon up a steep 
pitch, in draggmg an animal by the horns out of 
a bog-hole, in hauling logs for the fire, and in a 
hundred other ways aside from its legitimate 
purpose, the rope is of invaluable service, and 
dexterity with it is prized almost or quite as 
highly as good horsemanship, and is much rarer. 
Once a cowboy is a good roper and rider, the 
only other accomplishment he values is skill with 
his great army revolver, it being taken for granted 
that he is already a thorough plainsman and has 
long mastered the details of cattle-work; for the 
best roper and rider alive is of little use unless he 
is hard-working, honest, keenly alive to his em- 
ployer's interest, and very careful in the manage- 
ment of the cattle. 

All cowboys can handle the rope with more or 
less ease and precision, but great skill in its use is 
only attained after long practice, and for its 
highest development needs that the man should 
have begun in earliest youth. Mexicans literally 



Out on the Range 25 

practise from infancy ; the boy can hardly toddle 
before he gets a string and begins to render life 
a burden to the hens, goats, and pigs. A really 
first-class roper can command his own price, and 
is usually fit for little but his own special work. 

It is much the same with riding. The cowboy 
is an excellent rider in his own way, but his way 
differs from that of a trained school horseman or 
cross-country fox-himter as much as it does from 
the horsemanship of an Arab or of a Sioux Indian, 
and, as with all these, it has its special merits 
and special defects — schoolman, fox-hunter, cow- 
boy, Arab, and Indian being all alike admirable 
riders in their respective styles, and each cherish- 
ing the same profoimd and ignorant contempt for 
every method but his own. The flash riders, or 
horse-breakers, always called "bronco busters," 
can perform really marvelous feats, riding with 
ease the most vicious and unbroken beasts, that 
no ordinary cowboy would dare to tackle. 
Although sitting seemingly so loose in the saddle, 
such a rider cannot be jarred out of it by the 
wildest plunges, it being a favorite feat to sit out 
the antics of a bucking horse with silver half- 
dollars under each knee or in the stirrups imder 
each foot. But their method of breaking is very 
rough, consisting only in saddling and bridling 
a beast by main force and then riding him, also 
by main force, imtil he is exhausted, when he is 



26 Ranch Life 

turned over as "broken." Later on the cowboy 
himself may train his horse to stop or wheel 
instantly at a touch of the reins or bit, to start 
at top speed at a signal, and to stand motionless 
when left. An intelligent pony soon picks up a 
good deal of knowledge about the cow business 
on his own account. 

All cattle are branded, usually on the hip, 
shoulder, and side, or on any one of them, with 
letters, numbers, or figures, in every combination, 
the outfit being known by its brand. Near me, 
for instance, are the Three Sevens, the Thistle, 
the Bellows, the OX, the VI., the Seventy-six 
Bar (— ), and the Quarter Circle Diamond ($) 
outfits. The dew-lap and the ears may also be 
cut, notched, or slit. All brands are registered, 
and are thus protected against imitators, any 
man tampering with them being punished as 
severely as possible. Unbranded animals are 
called mavericks, and when found on the round-up 
are either branded by the owner of the range on 
which they are, or else are sold for the benefit of 
the association. At every shipping point, as well 
as where the beef cattle are received, there are 
stock inspectors who jealously examine all the 
brands on the live animals or on the hides of the 
slaughtered ones, so as to detect any foul play, 
which is immediately reported to the association. 
It becomes second nature with a cowboy to 



Out on the Range 27 

inspect and note the brands of every bunch of 
animals he comes across. 

Perhaps the thing that seems strangest to the 
traveler who for the first time crosses the bleak 
plains of this Upper Missouri grazing country is 
the small number of cattle seen. He can hardly 
believe he is in the great stock region, where for 
miles upon miles he will not see a single head, 
and will then come only upon a straggling herd 
of a few score. As a matter of fact, where there 
is no artificial food put up for winter use cattle 
always need a good deal of ground per head; 
and this is peculiarly the case with us in the 
Northwest, where much of the groimd is bare of 
vegetation and where what pasture there is is 
both short and sparse. It is a matter of absolute 
necessity, where beasts are left to shift for them- 
selves in the open during the bitter winter 
weather, that they then should have grass that 
they have not cropped too far down ; and to 
insure this it is necessary with us to allow on 
the average about twenty-five acres of ground 
to each animal. This means that a range of 
country ten miles square will keep between two 
and three thousand head of stock only, and if 
more are put on, it is at the risk of seeing a severe 
winter kill off half or three-quarters of the whole 
number. So a range may be in reality over- 
stocked when to an Eastern and unpractised eye 



28 Ranch Life 

it seems hardly to have on it a number worth 
taking into accoimt. 

Overstocking is the great danger threatening 
the stock-raising industry on the plains. This 
industry has only risen to be of more than local 
consequence during the past score of years, as 
before that time it was confined to Texas and 
California; but during these two decades of its 
existence the stockmen in different localities have 
again and again suffered the most ruinous losses, 
usually with overstocking as the ultimate cause. 
In the south the drought, and in the north the 
deep snows, and every^^here unusually bad 
winters, do immense damage; still, if the land 
is fitted for stock at all, they will, averaging one 
year with another, do very well so long as the 
feed is not cropped down too close. 

But, of course, no amount of feed will make 
some coimtries worth anything for cattle that 
are not housed during the winter ; and stockmen 
in choosing new ranges for their herds pay almost 
as much attention to the capacity of the land 
for yielding shelter as they do to the abundant 
and good quality of the grass. High up among 
the foot-hills of the moimtains cattle will not live 
through the winter; and an open, rolling prairie 
land of heavy rainfall, where in consequence the 
snow lies deep and there is no protection from 
the furious cold winds, is useless for winter 



Out on the Range 29 

grazing, no matter how thick and high the feed. 
The three essentials for a range are grass, water, 
and shelter : the water is only needed in summer 
and the shelter in winter, while it may be doubted 
if drought during the hot months has ever killed 
off more cattle than have died of exposure on 
shelterless ground to the icy weather, lasting 
from November to April. 

The finest summer range may be valueless 
either on account of its lack of shelter or because 
it is in a region of heavy snowfall — portions of 
territory lying in the same latitude and not very 
far apart often differing widely in this respect, 
or extraordinarily severe weather may cause a 
heavy death-rate utterly unconnected with over- 
stocking. This was true of the loss that visited 
the few herds which spent the very hard winter 
of 1880 on the northern cattle plains. These 
were the pioneers of their kind, and the grass 
was all that could be desired; yet the extraor- 
dinary severity of the weather proved too much 
for the cattle. This was especially the case with 
those herds consisting of "pilgrims," as they are 
called — that is, of animals driven up on to the 
range from the south, and therefore in poor 
condition. One such herd of pilgrims on the 
Powder River suffered a loss of thirty-six hun- 
dred out of a total of four thousand, and the 
survivors kept alive only by browsing on the 



30 Ranch Life 

tops of cotton woods felled for them. Even 
seasoned animals fared very badly. One great 
herd in the Yellowstone Valley lost about a 
fourth of its number, the loss falling mainly on 
the breeding cows, calves, and bulls, — always the 
chief sufferers, as the steers, and also the dry 
cows, will get through almost anything. The 
loss here would have been far heavier than it 
was had it not been for a curious trait shown 
by the cattle. They kept in bands of several 
hundred each, and during the time of the deep 
snows a band would make a start and travel 
several miles in a straight line, plowing their 
way through the drifts and beating out a broad 
track; then, when stopped by a frozen water- 
course or chain of buttes, they would turn back 
and graze over the trail thus made, the only 
place where they could get at the grass. 

A drenching rain, followed by a severe snap of 
cold, is even more destructive than deep snow, 
for the saturated coats of the poor beasts are 
turned into sheets of icy mail, and the grass- 
blades, frozen at the roots as well as above, 
change into sheaves of brittle spears as uneatable 
as so many icicles. Entire herds have perished 
in consequence of such a storm. Mere cold, 
however, will kill only very weak animals, which 
is fortunate for us, as the spirit in the ther- 
mometer during winter often sinks to fifty 



Out on the Range 31 

degrees below zero, the cold being literally- 
arctic ; yet though the cattle become thin during 
such a snap of weather, and sometimes have 
their ears, tails, and even horns frozen off, they 
nevertheless rarely die from the cold alone. But 
if there is a blizzard blowing at such a time, the 
cattle need shelter, and if caught in the open, 
will travel for scores of miles before the storm, 
tmtil they reach a break in the ground, or some 
stretch of dense woodland, which will shield 
them from the blasts. If cattle traveling in this 
manner come to some obstacle that they cannot 
pass, as, for instance, a wire fence or a steep 
railway embankment, they will not try to make 
their way back against the storm, but will simply 
stand with their tails to it until they drop dead 
in their tracks; and, accordingly, in some parts 
of the country — but luckily far to the south of 
us — the railways are fringed with countless 
skeletons of beasts that have thus perished, 
while many of the long wire fences make an 
almost equally bad showing. In some of the 
very open country of Kansas and Indian Ter- 
ritory, many of the herds during the past two 
years have suffered a loss of from sixty to eighty 
per cent, although this was from a variety of 
causes, including drought as well as severe winter 
weather. Too much rain is quite as bad as too 
little, especially if it falls after the first of August, 



32 Ranch Life 

for then, though the growth of grass is very rank 
and luxuriant, it yet has Httle strength and does 
not cure well on the stalk; and it is only possible 
to winter cattle at large at all because of the way 
in which the grass turns into natural hay by this 
curing on the stalk. 

But scantiness of food, due to overstocking, is 
the one really great danger to us in the north, 
who do not have to fear the droughts that 
occasionally devastate portions of the southern 
ranges. In a fairly good country, if the feed is 
plenty, the natural increase of a herd is sure 
shortly to repair any damage that may be done 
by an imusually severe winter — unless, indeed, 
the latter should be one such as occurs but two 
or three times in a century. When, however, the 
grass becomes cropped down, then the loss in 
even an ordinary year is heavy among the weaker 
animals, and if the winter is at all severe it 
becomes simply appalling. The snow covers the 
shorter grass much quicker, and even when there 
is enough, the cattle, weak and unfit to travel 
around, have to work hard to get it; their 
exertions tending to enfeeble them and to render 
them less able to cope with the exposure and 
cold. The large patches of brushwood, into 
which the cattle crowed and which to a small 
number afford ample shelter and some food, 
become trodden down and yield neither when 



Out on the Range 33 

the beasts become too plentiful. Again, the 
grass is, of course, soonest eaten off where there 
is shelter; and, accordingly, the broken ground 
to which the animals cling during winter may be 
grazed bare of vegetation, though the open plains, 
to which only the hardiest will at this season 
stray, may have plenty; and insufficiency of 
food, although not such as actually to starve 
them, weakens them so that they succumb 
readily to the cold or to one of the numerous 
accidents to which they are liable — as slipping off 
an icy butte or getting cast in a frozen washout. 
The cows in calf are those that suffer most, and 
so hea\'y is the loss among these and so light the 
calf crop that it is yet an open question whether 
our northern ranges are as a whole fitted for 
breeding. When the animals get weak they will 
huddle into some nook or comer and simply stay 
there till they die. An empty hut, for instance, 
will often in the spring be found to contain the 
carcasses of a dozen weak cows or poor steers that 
have crawled into it for protection from the cold, 
and once in have never moved out. 

Overstocking may cause little or no harm for 
two or three years, but sooner or later there 
comes a winter which means ruin to the ranches 
that have too many cattle on them; and in our 
coimtry, which is even now getting crowded, it 
is merely a question of time as to when a winter 

3 



34 Ranch Life 

will come that will understock the ranges by the 
summary process of killing off about half of all 
the cattle throughout the Northwest.' The herds 
that have just been put on suffer most in such a 
case; if they have come on late and are com- 
posed of weak animals, very few indeed, perhaps 
not ten per cent, will survive. The cattle that 
have been double or single wintered do better; 
while a range-raised steer is almost as tough as a 
buffalo. 

In our northern coimtry we have "free grass;" 
that is, the stockmen rarely own more than small 
portions of the land over which their cattle 
range, the bulk of it being unsurveyed and still 
the property of the National Government — for 
the latter refuses to sell the soil except in small 
lots, acting on the wise principle of distributing 
it among as many owners as possible. Here and 
there some ranchman has acquired title to narrow 
strips of territor>^ peculiarly valuable as giving 
water-right; but the amount of land thus occu- 
pied is small with us, — although the reverse is 
the case farther south, — and there is practically 
no fencing to speak of. As a consequence, the 
land is one vast pasture, and the man who over- 
stocks his own range damages his neighbors as 
much as himself. These huge northern pastures 

* Written in the fall of iS86; the ensuing winter exactly- 
fulfilled the prophecy. 



Out on the Range 35 

are too dry and the soil too poor to be used for 
agriculture until the rich, wet lands to the east 
and west are occupied; and at present we have 
little to fear from grangers. Of course, in the 
end much of the ground will be taken up for 
small farms, but the farmers that so far have 
come in have absolutely failed to make even a 
living, except now and then by raising a few 
vegetables for the use of the stockmen; and we 
are inclined to welcome the incoming of an 
occasional settler, if he is a decent man, espe- 
cially as, by the laws of the Territories in which 
the great grazing plains lie, he is obliged to fence 
in his own patch of cleared groimd, and we do 
not have to keep our cattle out of it. 

At present we are far more afraid of each other. 
There are always plenty of men who for the sake 
of the chance of gain they themselves run are 
willing to jeopardize the interests of their neigh- 
bors by putting on more cattle than the land will 
support — for the loss, of course, falls as heavily 
on the man who has put on the right number as 
on him who has put on too many; and it is 
against these individuals that we have to guard 
so far as we are able. To protect ourselves com- 
pletely is impossible, but the very identity of 
interest that renders all of us liable to suffer for 
the fault of a few also renders us as a whole able 
to take some rough measures to guard against 



36 Ranch Life 

the wrong-doing of a portion of our number ; for 
the fact that the cattle wander intermixed over 
the ranges forces all the ranchmen of a locality 
to combine if they wish to do their work effec- 
tively. Accordingly, the stockmen of a neigh- 
borhood, when it holds as many cattle as it safely 
can, usually imitedly refuse to work with any one 
who puts in another herd. In the cow coimtry a 
man is peculiarly dependent upon his neighbors, 
and a small outfit is wholly unable to work 
without their assistance when once the cattle 
have mingled completely with those of other 
brands. A large outfit is much more master of 
its destiny, and can do its own work quite by 
itself; but even such a one can be injured in 
countless ways if the hostility of the neighboring 
ranchmen is incurred. 

The best days of ranching are over; and 
though there are many ranchmen who still make 
money, yet during the past two or three years 
the majority have certainly lost. This is espe- 
cially true of the numerous Easterners who went 
into the business without any experience and 
trusted themselves entirely to their Western rep- 
resentatives ; although, on the other hand, many 
of those who have made most money at it are 
Easterners, who, however, have happened to be 
naturally fitted for the work and who have de- 
liberately settled do"\ATi to learning the business 



Out on the Range 37 

as they would have learned any other, devoting 
their whole time and energy to it. Stock-raising, 
as now" carried on, is characteristic of a young 
and wild land. As the country grows older, it 
will in some places die out, and in others entirely 
change its character; the ranches will be broken 
up, will be gradually modified into stock-farms, 
or, if on good soil, may even fall imder the sway 
of the husbandman. 

In its present form stock-raising on the plains 
is doomed, and can hardly outlast the century. 
The great free ranches, with their barbarous, 
picturesque, and curiously fascinating surround- 
ings, mark a primitive stage of existence as surely 
as do the great tracts of primeval forests, and 
like the latter, must pass away before the onward 
march of our people; and we who have felt the 
charm of the life, and have exulted in its abound- 
ing vigor and its bold, restless freedom, will not 
only regret its passing for our own sakes, but 
must also feel real sorrow that those who come 
after us are not to see, as we have seen, what is 
perhaps the pleasantest, healthiest, and most 
exciting phase of American existence. 



CHAPTER III. 

THE HOME RANCH. 

MY home ranch Ues on both sides of the Little 
Missouri, the nearest ranchman above me 
being about twelve, and the nearest below 
about ten, miles distant. The general course of 
the stream here is northerly, but, while flowing 
through my ranch, it takes a great westerly reach 
of some three miles, walled in, as always, between 
chains of steep, high bluffs half a mile or more 
apart. The stream twists down through the val- 
ley in long sweeps, leaving oval wooded bottoms, 
first on one side and then on the other ; and in an 
open glade among the thick-growing timber 
stands the long, low house of hewn logs. 

Just in front of the ranch veranda is a line of 
old cottonwoods that shade it during the fierce 
heats of summer, rendering it always cool and 
pleasant. But a few feet beyond these trees 
comes the cut-off bank of the river, through 
whose broad, sandy bed the shallow stream winds 
as if lost, except when a freshet fills it from brim 
to brim with foaming yellow water. The bluffs 
that wall in the river-valley curve back in semi- 
circles, rising from its alluvial bottom generally 
as abrupt cliffs, but often as steep, grassy slopes 

38 



The Home Ranch 39 

that lead up to great level plateaus ; and the line 
is broken every mile or two by the entrance of a 
coulee, or dry creek, whose head branches may 
be twenty miles back. Above us, where the 
river comes round the bend, the valley is very 
narrow, and the high buttes bounding it rise, 
sheer and barren, into scalped hill-peaks and 
naked knife-blade ridges. 

The other buildings stand in the same open 
glade with the ranch house, the dense growth 
of cotton woods and matted, thorny underbrush 
making a wall all about, through which we have 
chopped our wagon -roads and trodden out our 
own bridle-paths. The cattle have now trampled 
down this brush a little, but deer still lie in it, 
only a couple of hundred yards from the house; 
and from the door sometimes in the evening one 
can see them peer out into the open, or make their 
way down, timidly and cautiously, to drink at the 
river. The stable, sheds, and other outbuildings, 
with the hayricks and the pens for such cattle as 
we bring in during winter, are near the house ; the 
patch of fenced garden land is on the edge of the 
woods; and near the middle of the glade stands 
the high, circular horse-corral, with a snubbing- 
post in the center, and a wing built out from one 
side of the gate entrance, so that the saddle-band 
can be driven in without trouble. As it is very 
hard to work cattle where there is much brush. 



40 Ranch IJfe 

the larger cow-corral is some four miles off on an 
open bottom. 

A ranchman's life is certainly a very pleasant 
one, albeit generally varied with plenty of hard- 
ship and anxiety. Although occasionally he 
passes days of severe toil, — for example, if he 
goes on the round-up he works as hard as any of 
his men, — yet he no longer has to undergo the 
monotonous drudgery attendant upon the tasks 
of the cowboy or of the apprentice in the business. 
His fare is simple; but, if he chooses, it is good 
enough. Many ranches are provided with noth- 
ing at all but salt pork, canned goods, and bread ; 
indeed, it is a curious fact that in traveling through 
the cow cotmtry it is often impossible to get any 
milk or butter ; but this is only because the owners 
or managers are too lazy to take enough trouble 
to insure their own comfort. We ourselves 
always keep up two or three cows, choosing such 
as are naturally tame, and so we invariably have 
plenty of milk and, when there is time for churn- 
ing, a good deal of butter. We also keep hens, 
which, in spite of the damagmg inroads of hawks, 
bob-cats, and foxes, supply us with eggs, and in 
time of need, when our rifles have failed to keep 
us in game, with stewed, roast, or fried chicken 
also. From our garden we get potatoes, and 
unless drought, frost, or grasshoppers interfere 
(which they do about every second year), other 



The Home Ranch 41 

vegetables as well. For fresh meat we depend 
chiefly upon our prowess as hunters. 

During much of the time we are away on the 
different round-ups, that "wheeled house," the 
great four-horse wagon, being then our home; 
but when at the ranch our routine of life is always 
much the same, save during the excessively bitter 
weather of midwinter, when there is little to do 
except to hunt, if the days are fine enough. We 
breakfast early — before dawn when the nights 
have grown long, and rarely later than sunrise, 
even in midsummer. Perhaps before this meal, 
certainly the instant it is over, the man whose 
duty it is rides off to hunt up and drive in the 
saddle-band. Each of us has his own string of 
horses, eight or ten in number, and the whole 
band usually split up into two or three com- 
panies. In addition to the scattered groups of 
the saddle-band, our six or eight mares, with 
their colts, keep by themselves, and are rarely 
bothered by us, as no cowboy ever rides anything 
but horses, because mares give great trouble 
where all the animals have to be herded together. 
Once every two or three days somebody rides 
round and finds out where each of these smaller 
bands is, but the man who goes out in the morn- 
ing merely gathers one bimch. He drives these 
into the corral, the other men (who have been 
lolling idly about the house or stable, fixing their 



42 Ranch Life 

saddles or doing any odd job) coming out with 
their ropes as soon as they hear the patter of the 
unshod hoofs and the shouts of the cowboy driver. 
Going into the corral, and standing near the cen- 
ter, each of us picks out some one of his own string 
from among the animals that are trotting and 
running in a compact mass roimd the circle ; and 
after one or more trials, according to his skill, 
ropes it and leads it out. When all have caught 
their horses the rest are again turned loose, 
together with those that have been kept up over- 
night. 

Some horses soon get tame and do not need 
to be roped ; my pet cutting pony, little Muley, 
and good old Manitou, my companion in so 
many hunting trips, will neither of them stay 
with the rest of their fellows that are jamming and 
jostling each other as they rush round in the dust 
of the corral, but they very sensibly walk up and 
stand quietly with the men in the middle, by the 
snubbing-post. Both are great pets, Manitou in 
particular ; the wise old fellow being very fond of 
bread and sometimes coming up of his own accord 
to the ranch house and even putting his head into 
the door to beg for it. 

Once saddled, the men ride off on their different 
tasks ; for almost everything is done in the saddle, 
except that in winter we cut our firewood and 
quarry our coal, — both on the ranch, — and in 



Roping in a Horse-Corral. 



-and in 



The Home Ranch 43 

summer attend to the garden and put up what 
wild hay we need. 

If any horses have strayed, one or two of the men 
will be sent off to look for them ; for himting lost 
horses is one of the commonest and most irksome 
of our duties. Every outfit always has certain 
of its horses at large ; and if they remain out long 
enough they become as wild and wary as deer and 
have to be regularly surrounded and nm down. 
On one occasion, when three of mine had been 
running loose for a couple of months, we had to 
follow at full speed for at least fifteen miles before 
exhausting them enough to enable us to get some 
control oyer them and head them toward a corral. 
Twice I have had horses absent nearly a year 
before they were recovered. One of them, after 
being on the ranch nine months, went off one 
night and traveled about two hundred miles in 
a straight line back to its old haunts, swimming 
the Yellowstone on the way. Two others were 
at one time away nearly eighteen months, during 
which time we saw them twice, and on one occa- 
sion a couple of the men fairly ran their horses 
down in following them. We began to think 
they were lost for good, as they were all the time 
going farther down toward the Sioux country, 
but we finally recovered them. 

If the men do not go horse-hunting, they may 
ride off over the range ; for there is generally some 



44 Ranch Life 

work to be done among the cattle, such as driving 
in and branding calves that have been overlooked 
by the round-up, or getting some animal out of a 
bog-hole. During the early spring months, before 
the roimd-up begins, the chief work is in hauling 
out mired cows and steers ; and if we did not keep 
a sharp lookout, the losses at this season would 
be very serious. As long as everything is frozen 
solid there is, of course, no danger from miring; 
but when the thaw comes, along toward the begin- 
ning of March, a period of new danger to the cattle 
sets in. When the ice breaks up, the streams are 
left with an edging of deep bog, while the quick- 
sand is at its worst. As the frost goes out of the 
soil, the ground roimd every little alkali-spring 
changes into a trembling quagmire, and deep holes 
of slimy, tenacious mud form in the bottom of 
all the gullies. The cattle, which have had to live 
oil snow for three or four months, are very eager 
for water, and are weak and in poor condition. 
They rush heedlessly into any pool and stand 
there, drinking gallons of the icy water and sink- 
ing steadily into the mud. When they try to get 
out they are already too deep down, and are too 
weak to make a prolonged struggle. After one 
or two fits of desperate flotmdering, they resign 
themselves to their fate with dumb apathy and 
are lost, imless some one of us riding about dis- 
covers and hauls them out. They may be thus 



The Home Ranch 45 

lost in wonderfully small mud-holes; often they 
will be found dead in a gulch but two or three feet 
across, or in the quicksand of a creek so narrow 
that it could almost be jumped. An alkali-hole, 
where the water oozes out through the thick clay, 
is the worst of all, owing to the ropy tenacity with 
which the horrible substance sticks and clings to 
any imfortunate beast that gets into it. 

In the spring these mud-holes cause very serious 
losses among the cattle, and are at all times fruit- 
ful sources of danger ; indeed, during an ordinary 
year more cattle die from getting mired than 
from any other cause. In addition to this they 
also often prove very annoying to the rider him- 
self, as getting his steed mired or caught in a 
quicksand is one of the commonest of the acci- 
dents that beset a horseman in the far West. 
This usually happens in fording a river, if the 
latter is at all high, or else in crossing one of the 
numerous creeks; although I once saw a horse 
and rider suddenly engulfed while leisurely walk- 
ing over what appeared to be dry land. They 
had come to an alkali mud-hole, an old buffalo- 
wallow, which had filled up and was covered with 
a sim-baked crust, that let them through as if 
they had stepped on a trap-door. There being 
several of us along, we got down our ropes and 
dragged both unfortunates out in short order. 

When the river is up it is a very common thing 



46 Ranch Life 

for a horseman to have great difficulty in crossing, 
for the swift, brown water runs over a bed of deep 
quicksand that is ever shifting. An inexperienced 
horse, or a mule, — for a mule is useless in mud or 
quicksand, — becomes mad with fright in such 
a crossing, and, after speedily exhausting its 
strength in wild struggles, will throw itself on 
its side and drown unless the rider gets it out. 
An old horse used to such work will, on the con- 
trary, take matters quietly and often push along 
through really dangerous quicksand. Old Alani- 
tou never loses his head for an instant ; but, now 
resting a few seconds, now feeling his way cau- 
tiously forward, and now making two or three 
desperate plunges, will go on wherever a horse 
possibly can. It is really dangerous crossing 
some of the creeks, as the bottom may give way 
where it seems hardest; and if one is alone he 
may work hours in vain before getting his horse 
out, even after taking off both saddle and bridle, 
the only hope being to head it so that every plimge 
takes it an inch or two in the right direction. 

Nor are mud-holes the only danger the horse- 
man has to fear; for in much of the Bad Lands 
the buttes are so steep and broken that it needs 
genuine mountaineering skill to get through them, 
and no horse but a Western one, bred to the busi- 
ness, could accomplish the feat. In many parts 
of our country it is impossible for a horseman 



The Home Ranch 47 

who does not know the land to cross it, and it is 
difficult enough even for an experienced hand. 
For a stretch of nearly ten miles along the Little 
Missouri above my range, and where it passes 
through it, there are but three or four places 
where it is possible for a horseman to get out to 
the eastern prairie through the exceedingly broken 
country lying back from the river. In places this 
very rough ground comes down to the water; 
elsewhere it lies back near the heads of the creeks. 
In such very bad ground the whole country seems 
to be one tangled chaos of canyon-like valleys, 
winding gullies and washouts with abrupt, un- 
broken sides, isolated peaks of sandstone, marl, 
or "gumbo" clay, which rain turns into slippery 
glue, and hill chains the ridges of which always 
end in sheer cliffs. After a man has made his 
way with infinite toil for half a mile, a point will 
be reached around which it is an absolute impos- 
sibility to go, and the adventurer has nothing to 
do but painfully retrace his steps and try again 
in a new direction, as likely as not with the same 
result. In such a place the rider dismounts and 
leads his horse, the latter climbing with catlike 
agility up seemingly inaccessible heights, scram- 
bling across the steep, sloping shoulders of the 
bluffs, sliding down the faces of the clay cliffs 
with all four legs rigid, or dropping from ledge to 
ledge like a goat, and accepting with unruffled 



48 Ranch Life 

composure an occasional roll from top to bottom. 
But, in spite of the climbing abilities of the ponies, 
it is difficult, and at times— for our steeds, at any 
rate — dangerous work to go through such places, 
and we only do it when it cannot be avoided. 
Once I was overtaken by darkness while trying 
to get through a great tract of very rough land, 
and, after once or twice nearly breaking my neck, 
in despair had to give up all attempts to get out, 
and until daybreak simply stayed where I was, in 
a kind of ledge or pocket on the side of the cliff, 
luckily sheltered from the wind. It was mid- 
summer and the nights were short, but this par- 
ticular one seemed quite long enough ; and though 
I was on the move by dawn, it was three hours 
later before I led the horse, as himgry, numb, and 
stiff as myself, out on the prairie again. 

Occasionally it is imperatively necessary to 
cross some of the worst parts of the Bad Lands 
with a wagon, and such a trip is exhausting and 
laborious beyond belief. Often the wagon will 
have to be taken to pieces every few hundred 
yards in order to get it over a ravine, lower it into 
a valley, or drag it up a cliff. One outfit, that a 
year ago tried to take a short cut through some 
of the Bad Lands of the Powder River, made just 
four miles in three days, and then had to come 
back to their starting-point after all. But with 
only saddle-horses we feel that it must be a very 



The Home Ranch 49 

extraordinary country indeed if, in case of neces- 
sity, we cannot go through it. 

The long forenoon's work, with its attendant 
mishaps to man and beast, being over, the men 
who have been out among the horses and cattle 
come riding in, to be joined by their fellows — if 
any there be — who have been hunting, or haying, 
or chopping wood. The midday dinner is vari- 
able as to time, for it comes when the men have 
returned from their work; but, whatever be the 
hour, it is the most substantial meal of the day, 
and we feel that we have little fault to find with 
a table on the clean cloth of which are spread 
platters of smoked elk meat, loaves of good bread, 
jugs and bowls of milk, saddles of venison or 
broiled antelope steaks, perhaps roast and fried 
prairie chickens, with eggs, butter, wild plums, 
and tea or coffee. 

The afternoon's tasks are usually much the 
same as the morning's, but this time is often spent 
in doing the odds and ends; as, for instance, it 
may be devoted to breaking-in a new horse. 
Large outfits generally hire a bronco-buster to 
do this ; but we ourselves almost always break 
our o\\Ti horses, two or three of my men being 
pretty good riders, although none of them can 
claim to be anything out of the common. A 
first-class flash rider or bronco-buster receives 
high wages, and deserves them, for he follows a 
4 



50 Ranch Life 

most dangerous trade, at which no man can hope 
to grow old; his work being infinitely harder 
than that of an Eastern horse-breaker or rough- 
rider, because he has to do it in such a limited 
time. A good rider is a good rider all the world 
over; but an Eastern or English horse-breaker 
and a Western bronco-buster have so little in com- 
mon with each other as regards style or surround- 
ings, and are so totally out of place in doing each 
other's work, that it is almost impossible to get 
either to admit that the other has any merits at 
all as a horseman, for neither could sit in the 
saddle of the other or could without great diffi- 
culty perform his task. The ordinary Eastern 
seat, which approaches more or less the seat of a 
cross-country rider or fox-hunter, is nearly as 
different from the cowboy's seat as from that of 
a man who rides bareback. The stirrups on a 
stock saddle are much farther back than they are 
on an ordinary English one (a difference far more 
important than the high horn and cantle of the 
former), and the man stands nearly erect in them, 
instead of having his legs bent ; and he grips with 
the thighs and not with the knees, throwing his 
feet well out. Some of the things he teaches his 
horse would be wholly useless to an Eastern eques- 
trian: for example, one of the first lessons the 
newly caught animal has to learn is not to "run 
on a rope;" and he is taught this by being vio- 



The Home Ranch 51 

lently snubbed up, probably turning a somer- 
sault, the first two or three times that he feels the 
noose settle round his neck, and makes a mad rush 
for liberty. The snubbing-post is the usual 
adjunct in teaching such a lesson ; but a skilful 
man can do without any help and throw a horse 
clean over by holding the rope tight against the 
left haunch, at the same time leaning so far back, 
with the legs straight in front, that the heels dig 
deep into the ground when the strain comes, and 
the horse, running out with the slack of the rope, 
is brought up standing, or even turned head over 
heels by the shock. Cowboys are probably the 
only workingmen in the world who invariably 
wear gloves, buckskin gauntlets being preferred, 
as otherwise the ropes would soon take every 
particle of skin off their hands. 

A bronco-buster has to work by such violent 
methods in consequence of the short amoimt of 
time at his command. Horses are cheap, each 
outfit has a great many, and the wages for break- 
ing an animal are but five or ten dollars. Three 
rides, of an hour or two each, on as many con- 
secutive days, are the outside number a bronco- 
buster deems necessary before turning an animal 
over as "broken." The average bronco-buster, 
however, handles horses so very rudely that we 
prefer, aside from motives of economy, to break 
our owTi ; and this is always possible, if we take 



52 Ranch Life 

enough time. The best and quietest horses on 
the ranch are far from being those broken by the 
best riders ; on the contrary, they are those that 
have been handled most gently, although firmly, 
and that have had the greatest number of days 
devoted to their education. 

Some horses, of course, are almost incurably 
vicious, and must be conquered by main force. 
One pleasing brute on my ranch will at times 
rush at a man open-mouthed like a wolf, and this 
is a regular trick of the range-stallions. In a 
great many — indeed, in most — localities there are 
wild horses to be found, which, although invari- 
ably of domestic descent, being either themselves 
runaways from some ranch or Indian outfit, or 
else claiming such for their sires and dams, yet 
are quite as wild as the antelope on whose domain 
they have intruded. Ranchmen run in these wdld 
horses whenever possible, and they are but little 
more difficult to break than the so-called "tame" 
animals. But the wild stallions are, whenever 
possible, shot; both because of their propensity 
for driving off the ranch mares, and because their 
incurable viciousness makes them always unsafe 
companions for other horses still more than for 
men. A wild stallion fears no beast except the 
grizzly, and will not always flinch from an en- 
counter with it ; yet it is a curious fact that a jack 
will almost always kill one in a fair fight. The 



The Home Ranch 53 

particulars of a fight of tliis sort were related to 
me by a cattle man who was engaged in bringing 
out blooded stock from the East. Among the 
animals imder his charge were two great stallions, 
one gray and one black, and a fine jackass, not 
much over half the size of either of the former. 
The animals were kept in separate pens, but one 
day both horses got into the same enclosure, next 
to the jack-pen, and began to fight as only enraged 
stallions can, striking like boxers with their fore 
feet, and biting with their teeth. The gray was 
getting the best of it ; but while clinched with his 
antagonist in one tussle they rolled against the 
jack-pen, breaking it in. No sooner was the jack 
at liberty than, with ears laid back and mouth 
wide open, he made straight for the two horses, 
who had for the moment separated. The gray 
turned to meet him, rearing on his hind legs and 
striking at him with his fore feet; but the jack 
slipped in, and in a minute grasped his antagonist 
by the throat with his wide-open jaws, and then 
held on like a bulldog, all four feet planted stiffly 
in the soil. The stallion made tremendous efforts 
to shake him off : he would try to whirl roimd and 
kick him, but for that the jack was too short; 
then he would rise up, lifting the jack off the 
groimd, and strike at him with his fore feet; but 
all that he gained by this was to skin his foe's 
front legs without making him loose his hold. 



54 Ranch Life 

Twice they fell, and twice the stallion rose, by 
main strength dragging the jack with him; but 
all in vain. Meanwhile the black horse attacked 
both the combatants, with perfect impartiality, 
striking and kicking them with his hoofs, while 
his teeth, as they slipped off the tough hides, met 
with a snap like that of a bear-trap. Undoubt- 
edly the jack would have killed at least one of 
the horses had not the men come up, and with 
no small difficulty separated the maddened brutes. 
If not breaking horses, mending saddles, or 
doing something else of the sort, the cowboys 
will often while away their leisure moments by 
practising with the rope. A man cannot prac- 
tise too much with this if he wishes to attain even 
moderate proficiency ; and as a matter of fact he 
soon gets to wish to practise the whole time. A 
cowboy is always roping something, and it espe- 
cially delights him to try his skill at game. A 
friend of mine, a young ranchman in the Judith 
basin, about four years ago roped a buffalo, and 
by the exercise of the greatest skill, both on his 
own part and on his steed's, actually succeeded, 
by alternate bullying and coaxing, in getting the 
huge brute almost into camp. I have occasion- 
ally known men on fast horses to rope deer, and 
even antelope, when circumstances all joined to 
favor them ; and last summer one of the cowboys 
on a ranch about thirty miles off ran into and 



The Home Ranch 55 

roped a wounded elk. A forty-foot lariat is the 
one commonly used, for the ordinary range at 
which a man can throw it is only about twenty- 
five feet. Few men can throw forty feet; and 
to do this, taking into accotmt the coil, needs 
a sixty-foot rope. 

When the day's work is over we take supper, 
and bed-time comes soon afterward, for the men 
who live on ranches sleep well and soundly. As 
a rule, the nights are cool and bracing, even in 
midsummer ; except when we occasionally have a 
spell of burning weather, with a steady, hot wind 
that blows in our faces like a furnace blast, send- 
ing the thermometer far up above a hundred and 
making us gasp for breath, even at night, in the 
dry-baked heat of the air. But it is only rarely 
that we get a few days of this sort ; generally, no 
matter how unbearable the heat of the day has 
been, we can at least sleep pleasantly at night. 

A ranchman's work is, of course, free from 
much of the sameness attendant upon that of a 
mere cowboy. One day he will ride out with 
his men among the cattle, or after strayed horses ; 
the next he may hunt, so as to keep the ranch 
in meat; then he can make the tour of his out- 
lying camps ; or, again, may join one of the round- 
ups for a week or two, perhaps keeping with it the 
entire time it is working. On occasions he will 
have a good deal of spare time on his hands, 



56 Ranch Life 

which, if he chooses, he can spend in reading or 
writing. If he cares for books, there will be 
many a worn volume in the primitive little sitting- 
room, with its log walls and huge fireplace; but 
after a hard day's work a man will not read much, 
but will rock to and fro in the flickering firelight, 
talking sleepily over his success in the day's chase 
and the difficulty he has had with the cattle; or 
else may simply lie stretched at full length on the 
elk-hides and wolf-skins in front of the hearth- 
stone, listening in drowsy silence to the roar and 
crackle of the blazing logs and to the moaning of 
the wind outside. 

In the sharp fall weather the riding is delicious 
all day long ; but even in the late spring, and all 
through the summer, we try, if we can, to do our 
work before the heat of the day, and if going on a 
long ride, whether to h\mt or for other purposes, 
leave the ranch house by dawn. 

The early rides in the spring mornings have a 
charm all their own, for they are taken when, for 
the one and only time during the year, the same 
brown landscape of these high plains turns to a 
vivid green, as the new grass sprouts and the trees 
and bushes thrust forth the yoiing leaves ; and at 
dawn, with the dew glittering everywhere, all 
things show at their best and freshest. The 
flowers are out and a man may gallop for miles 
at a stretch with his horse's hoofs sinking at every 



The Home Ranch 57 

stride into the carpet of prairie roses, whose short 
stalks lift the beautiful blossoms but a few inches 
from the ground. Even in the waste places the 
cactuses are blooming ; and one kind in particular, 
a dwarfish, globular plant, with its mass of splen- 
did crimson flowers, glows against the sides of the 
gray buttes like a splash of flame. 

The ravines, winding about and splitting into a 
labyrinth of coulees, with chains of rounded hills 
to separate them, have groves of trees in their 
bottoms, along the sides of the water-courses. In 
these are found the blacktail deer, and his cousin, 
the whitetail, too, with his flaunting flag; but in 
the spring-time, when we are after antelope only, 
we must go out farther to the flat prairie land on 
the divide. Here, in places, the level, grassy 
plains are strewn with mounds and hillocks of 
red or gray scoria, that stand singly or clustered 
into little groups, their tops crested, or their sides 
covered, by queer detached masses of volcanic 
rock, wrought into strange shapes by the dead 
forces whose blind, hidden strength long ago called 
them into being. The road our wagons take, when 
the water is too high for us to come down the river- 
bottom, stretches far ahead — two dark, straight, 
parallel furrows which merge into one in the dis- 
tance. Quaint little homed frogs crawl sluggishly 
along in the wheel tracks, and the sickle-billed 
curlews run over the ground or soar above and 



58 Ranch Life 

around the horsemen, uttering their mournful, 
never-ceasing clamor. The grass-land stretches 
out in the sunlight like a sea, every wind bending 
the blades into a ripple and flecking the prairie 
with shifting patches of a different green from 
that aroimd, exactly as the touch of a light squall 
or wind-gust will fleck the smooth surface of the 
ocean. Our Western plains differ widely in detail 
from those of Asia ; yet they always call to mind 

.... The Scythian 
On the wide steppe, unharnessing 
His wheel'd house at noon. 

He tethers his beast down, and makes his meal — 
Mares' milk, and bread 
Baked on the embers ; — all around 
The boundless, waving grass-plains stretch . . . 
. . . ; before him, for long miles, 
Alive with bright green lizards 
And the springing bustard fowl, 
The track, a straight black line, 
Furrows the rich soil ; here and there 
Clusters of lonely mounds 
Topp'd with rough hewn, 
Gray, rain-blear'd statues, overpeer 
The sunny waste. 

In the spring mornings the rider on the plains 
will hear bird songs unknown in the East. The 
Missouri skylark sings while soaring above the 
great plateaus so high in the air that it is impos- 
sible to see the bird; and this habit of singing 
while soaring it shares with some sparrow-like 



The Home Ranch 59 

birds that are often found in company with it. 
The white-shouldered lark-bunting, in its livery 
of black, has rich, full notes, and as it sings on 
the wing it reminds one of the bobolink ; and the 
sweet-voiced lark-finch also utters its song in the 
air. These birds, and most of the sparrows of 
the plains, are characteristic of this region. 

But many of our birds, especially those found in 
the wooded river-bottoms, answer to those of the 
East ; only that nearly every one has some marked 
point of difference from its Eastern representa- 
tive. The bluebird out West is very much of a 
blue bird indeed, for it has no "earth tinge" on 
its breast at all ; while the indigo-bird, on the con- 
tvEiry, has gained the ruddy markings that the 
other has lost. The flicker has the shafts of its 
wing and tail quills colored orange instead of 
yellow. The towhee has lost all title to its name, 
for its only cry is a mew like that of a catbird; 
while, most wonderful of all, the meadow-lark has 
found a rich, strong voice, and is one of the sweet- 
est and most incessant singers we have. 

Throughout June the thickets and groves about 
the ranch house are loud with bird music from 
before dawn till long after sunrise. The thrashers 
have sung all the night through from among the 
thorn-bushes if there has been a moon, or even 
if there has been bright starlight ; and before the 
first glimmer of gray the bell-like, silvery songs 



6o Ranch Life 

of the shy woodland thrushes chime in; while 
meadow-lark, robin, bluebird, and song-sparrow, 
together with many rarer singers, like the gros- 
beak, join in swelling the chorus. There are some 
would-be singers whose intention is better than 
their execution. Blackbirds of several kinds are 
plenty round the house and stables, walking about 
with a knowing air, like so many dwarf crows; 
and now and then a flock of yellow-heads will 
mix for a few days with their purple or rustv 
colored brethren. The males of these yellow- 
headed grakles are really handsome, their orange 
and yellow heads contrasting finely with the black 
of the rest of their plumage ; but their voices are 
discordant to a degree. When a flock has done 
feeding it will often light in straggling order 
among the trees in front of the veranda, and 
then the males will begin to sing, or rather to 
utter the most extraordinary collection of broken 
sounds — creakings, gurglings, hisses, twitters, and 
every now and then a liquid note or two. It is 
like an accentuated representation of the noise 
made by a flock of common blackbirds. x\t night- 
fall the poor-wills begin to utter their boding call 
from the wooded ravines back in the hills; not 
"whip-poor-will," as in the East, but with two 
syllables only. They often come round the ranch 
house. Late one evening I had been sitting 
motionless on the veranda, looking out across 



The Home Ranch 6i 

the water and watching the green and brown 
of the hilltops change to purple and umber and 
then fade off into shadowy gray as the somber 
darkness deepened. Suddenly a poor- will lit on 
the floor beside me and stayed some little time; 
now and then uttering its mournful cries, then 
ceasing for a few moments as it flitted round 
after insects, and again returning to the same 
place to begin anew. The little owls, too, call 
to each other with tremulous, quavering voices 
throughout the livelong night, as they sit in the 
creaking trees that overhang the roof. Now and 
then we hear the wilder voices of the wilderness, 
from animals that in the hours of darkness do not 
fear the neighborhood of man: the coyotes wail 
like dismal ventriloquists, or the silence may be 
broken by the strident challenge of a lynx, or by 
the snorting and stamping of a deer that has come 
to the edge of the open. 

In the hot noontide hours of midsummer the 
broad ranch veranda, always in the shade, is 
almost the only spot where a man can be com- 
fortable ; but here he can sit for hours at a time, 
leaning back in his rocking-chair, as he reads or 
smokes, or with half-closed, dreamy eyes gazes 
across the shallow, nearly dry river-bed to the 
wooded bottoms opposite, and to the plateaus 
lying back of them. Against the sheer white 
faces of the cliffs, that come dowTi without a 



62 Ranch Life 

break, the dark green treetops stand out in bold 
relief. In the hot, lifeless air all objects that are 
not near by seem to sway and waver. There are 
few sounds to break the stillness. From the upper 
branches of the cotton wood trees overhead, whose 
shimmering, tremulous leaves are hardly ever 
quiet, but if the wind stirs at all, rustle and quiver 
and sigh all day long, comes every now and then 
the soft, melancholy cooing of the mourning dove, 
whose voice always seems far away and expresses 
more than any other sound in nature the sadness 
of gentle, hopeless, never-ending grief. The other 
birds are still ; and very few animals move about. 
Now and then the black shadow of a wheeling 
vulture falls on the sun-scorched ground. The 
cattle, that have stnmg down in long files from 
the hills, lie quietly on the sand-bars, except that 
some of the bulls keep traveling up and down, 
bellowing and routing or giving vent to long, 
surly grumblings as they paw the sand and toss 
it up with their horns. At times the horses, too, 
will come down to drink, and to splash and roll 
in the water. 

The prairie-dogs alone are not daunted by the 
heat, but sit at the mouths of their burrows with 
their usual pert curiosity. They are bothersome 
little fellows, and most prolific, increasing in spite 
of the perpetual war made on them by every car- 
nivorous bird and beast. One of their worst foes 



The Home Ranch 63 

is the black-footed ferret, a handsome, rather rare 
animal, somewhat like a mink, with a yellow- 
brown body and dark feet and mask. It is a 
most bloodthirsty little brute, feeding on all small 
animals and groimd birds. It will readily master 
a jack-rabbit, will kill very yoimg fawns if it finds 
them in the mother's absence, and works extra- 
ordinary havoc in a dog town, as it can follow the 
wretched little beasts down into the burrows. In 
one instance, I knew of a black-footed ferret 
making a succession of inroads on a ranchman's 
poultry, killing and carrying off most of them 
before it was trapped. Coyotes, foxes, swifts, 
badgers, and skunks also like to lurk about the 
dog towns. Of the skunks, by the way, we had 
last year altogether too much; there was a per- 
fect plague of them all along the river, and they 
took to trying to get into the huts, with the stupid 
pertinacity of the species. At every ranch house 
dozens were killed, we ourselves bagging thirty- 
three, all slain near the house, and one, to our 
unspeakable sorrow, in it. 

In making a journey over ground we know, 
during the hot weather we often prefer to ride 
by moonlight. The moon shines very brightly 
through the dry, clear night air, turning the gray 
buttes into glimmering silver; and the horses 
travel far more readily and easily than under the 
glaring noonday sun. The road between my 



64 Ranch Life 

upper and lower ranch houses is about forty miles 
long, sometimes following the river-bed, and then 
again branching off inland, crossing the great 
plateaus and winding through the ravines of the 
broken country. It is a five hours' fair ride ; and 
so, in a hot spell, we like to take it during the cool 
of the night, starting at sunset. After nightfall 
the face of the country seems to alter marvelously, 
and the clear moonlight only intensifies the change. 
The river gleams like running quicksilver, and the 
moonbeams play over the grassy stretches of the 
plateaus and glance off the wind-rippled blades as 
they would from water. The Bad Lands seem 
to be stranger and wilder than ever, the silvery 
rays turning the country into a kind of grim fairy- 
land. The grotesque, fantastic outlines of the 
higher cliffs stand out with startling clearness, 
while the lower buttes have become formless, 
misshapen masses, and the deep gorges are in 
black shadow; in the darkness there will be no 
sound but the rhythmic echo of the hoof-beats 
of the horses, and the steady, metallic clank of 
the steel bridle-chains. 

But the fall is the time for riding; for in the 
keen, frosty air neither man nor beast will tire, 
though out from the dawn until the shadows have 
again waxed long and the daylight has begim to 
wane, warning all to push straight for home with- 
out drawing rein. Then deer-saddles and elk- 



The Home Ranch 65 

haimches hang from the trees near the house; 
and one can have good sport right on the sand 
of the river-bed, for we always keep shotgun or 
rifle at hand, to be ready for any prairie chickens, 
or for such of the passing water-fowl as light in 
the river near us. Occasionally we take a shot 
at a flock of waders, among which the pretty 
avocets are the most striking in looks and man- 
ners. Prairie fowl are quite plenty all round us, 
and occasionally small flocks come fairly down into 
the yard, or perch among the trees near by. At 
evening they fly dowTi to the river to drink, and 
as they sit on the sand-bars offer fine marks for 
the rifles. So do the geese and ducks when they 
occasionally light on the same places or paddle 
leisurely down stream in the middle of the river; 
but to make much of a bag of these we have to 
use the heavy No. 10, choke-bore shotgun, while 
the little i6-bore fowling-piece is much the 
handiest for prairie fowl. A good many dif- 
ferent kinds of water-fowl pass, ranging in size 
from a teal duck to a Canada goose, and all of 
them at times help to eke out our bill of fare. 
Last fall a white-fronted goose lighted on the 
river in front of the ranch house, and three of us, 
armed with miscellaneous weapons, went out 
after him ; we disabled him, and then after much 
bad shooting, and more violent running through 
thick sand and thick underbrush, finally overtook 
5 



66 Ranch Life 

and most foully butchered him. The snow geese 
and common wild geese are what we usually kill, 
however. 

Sometimes strings of sandhill cranes fly along 
the river, their guttural clangor being heard very 
far off. They usually light on a plateau, where 
sometimes they form rings and go through a 
series of queer antics, dancing and posturing to 
each other. They are exceedingly wide-awake 
birds, and more shy and wary than antelope, so 
that they are rarely shot; yet once I succeeded 
in stalking up to a group in the early morning, 
and firing into them rather at random, my bullet 
killed a full-grown female. Its breast, when 
roasted, proved to be very good eating. 

Sometimes we vary our diet with fish — wall- 
eyed pike, ugly, slimy catfish, and other uncouth 
finny things, looking very fit denizens of the mud- 
choked water; but they are good eating withal, 
in spite of their uncanny appearance. We usually 
catch them with set lines, left out overnight in 
the deeper pools. 

The cattle are fattest and in best condition 
during the fall, and it is then that the bulk of the 
beef steers are gathered and shipped — four-year- 
olds as a rule, though some threes and fives go 
along with them. Cattle are a nuisance while 
hunting on foot, as they either take fright and 
nm off when they see the hunter, scaring all game 



The Home Ranch 67 

within sight, or else, what is worse, follow him, 
blustering and bullying and pretending that they 
are on the point of charging, but rarely actually 
doing so. Still, they are occasionally really dan- 
gerous, and it is never entirely safe for a man to 
be on foot when there is a chance of meeting the 
droves of long-horned steers. But they will 
always bluster rather than fight, whether with 
men or beasts, or with one another. The 
bulls and some of the steers are forever traveling 
and challenging each other, never ceasing their 
hoarse rumbling and moaning and their long- 
drawTi, savage bellowing, tearing up the banks 
with their horns and sending little spurts of dust 
above their shoulders with their fore hoofs; yet 
they do not seem especially fond of real fighting, 
although, of course, they do occasionally have 
most desperate and obstinate set-tos with one 
another. A large bear will make short work of 
a bull : a few months ago one of the former killed 
a very big bull near a ranch house a score of miles 
or so distant, and during one night tore up and 
devoured a large part of his victim. The ranch- 
man poisoned the carcass and killed the bear. 



CHAPTER IV. 

THE ROUND-UP. 

DURING the winter-time there is ordinarily 
but little work done among the cattle. 
There is some line riding, and a continual 
lookout is kept for the very weak animals, — 
usually cows and calves, who have to be driven 
in, fed, and housed; but most of the stock are 
left to shift for themselves, undisturbed. Almost 
every stock-growers' association forbids branding 
any calves before the spring round-up. If great 
bands of cattle wander off the range, parties may 
be fitted out to go after them and bring them 
back; but this is only done when absolutely 
necessary, as when the drift of the cattle has been 
toward an Indian reservation or a settled granger 
country, for the weather is very severe, and the 
horses are so poor that their food must be carried 
along. 

The bulk of the work is done during the summer, 
including the late spring and early fall, and con- 
sists mainly in a succession of round-ups, begin- 
ning, with us, in May and ending toward the last 
of October. 

But a good deal may be done in the intervals 

68 



The Round-up 69 

by riding over one's range. Frequently, too, 
herding will be practised on a large scale. 

Still more important is the "trail" work; 
cattle, while driven from one range to another, 
or to a shipping point for beef, being said to be 
"on the trail." For years, the oversupply from 
the vast breeding ranches to the south, especially 
in Texas, has been driven northward in large 
herds, either to the shipping towns along the 
great railroads, or else to the fattening ranges of 
the Northwest ; it having been found, so far, that 
while the calf crop is larger in the South, beeves 
become much heavier in the North. Such cattle, 
for the most part, went along tolerably well- 
marked routes or trails, which became for the 
time being of great importance, flourishing — and 
extremely lawless — towns growing up along them ; 
but with the growth of the railroad system, and 
above all with the filling up of the northern ranges, 
these trails have steadily become of less and less 
consequence, though many herds still travel them 
on their way to the already crowded ranges of 
western Dakota and Montana, or to the Canadian 
regions beyond. The trail work is something by 
itself. The herds may be on the trail several 
months, averaging fifteen miles or less a day. 
The cowboys accompanying each have to undergo 
much hard toil, of a peculiarly same and weari- 
some kind, on account of the extreme slowness 



70 Ranch Life 

with which everything must be done, as trail 
cattle should never be hurried. The foreman of a 
trail outfit must be not only a veteran cowhand, 
but also a miracle of patience and resolution. 

Round-up work is far less irksome, there being 
an immense amount of dash and excitement con- 
nected with it; and when once the cattle are on 
the range, the important work is done during the 
round-up. On cow ranches, or wherever there is 
breeding stock, the spring round-up is the great 
event of the season, as it is then that the bulk of 
the calves are branded. It usually lasts six 
weeks, or thereabouts; but its end by no means 
implies rest for the stockman. On the contrary, 
as soon as it is over, wagons are sent to work 
out-of-the-way parts of the coimtry that have 
been passed over, but where cattle are supposed 
to have drifted ; and by the time these have come 
back the first beef round-up has begun, and 
thereafter beeves are steadily gathered and 
shipped, at least from among the larger herds, 
until cold weather sets in; and in the fall there 
is another round-up, to brand the late calves and 
see that the stock is got back on the range. As 
all of these round-ups are of one character, a 
description of the most important, taking place 
in the spring, will be enough. 

In April we begin to get up the horses. Through- 
out the winter very few have been kept for use, 



The Round-up 71 

as they are then poor and weak, and must be 
given grain and hay if they are to be worked. 
The men in the line camps need two or three 
apiece, and each man at the home ranch has a 
couple more; but the rest are left out to shift 
for themselves, which the tough, hardy little 
fellows are well able to do. Ponies can pick up 
a living where cattle die ; though the scanty feed, 
which they may have to imcover by pawing off 
the snow, and the bitter weather often make 
them look very gaunt by spring-time. But the 
first warm rains bring up the green grass, and 
then all the live-stock gain flesh with wonderful 
rapidity. When the spring rotmd-up begins the 
horses should be as fat and sleek as possible. 
After running all winter free, even the most sober 
pony is apt to betray an inclination to buck; 
and, if possible, we like to ride every animal once 
or twice before we begin to do real work with 
him. Animals that have escaped for any length 
of time are almost as bad to handle as if they had 
never been broken. One of the two horses men- 
tioned in a former chapter as having been gone 
eighteen months has, since his return, been sug- 
gestively dubbed " Dynamite Jimmy," on accoimt 
of the incessant and eruptive energy with which 
he bucks. Many of our horses, by the way, are 
thus named from some feat or peculiarity. Wire 
Fence, when being broken, ran into one of the 



72 Ranch Life 

abominations after which he is now called; 
Hackamore once got away and remained out for 
three weeks w4th a hackamore, or breaking- 
halter, on him; Macaulay contracted the habit 
of regularly getting rid of the huge Scotchman 
to whom he was entrusted; Bulberry Johnny 
spent the hour or two after he was first mounted 
in a large patch of thorny bulberry bushes, his 
distracted rider unable to get him to do anything 
but move round sidewise in a circle; Fall Back 
would never get to the front ; Water Skip always 
jumps mud-puddles ; and there are a dozen others 
with names as purely descriptive. 

The stock-growers of Montana, of the western 
part of Dakota, and even of portions of extreme 
northern Wyoming, — that is, of all the grazing 
lands lying in the basin of the Upper ]\Iissouri, — 
have united, and formed themselves into the great 
Montana Stock-growers' Association. Among the 
countless benefits they have derived from this 
course, not the least has been the way in which 
the various round-ups work in with and supple- 
ment one another. At the spring meeting of the 
association, the entire territory mentioned above, 
including perhaps a himdred thousand square 
miles, is mapped out into roimd-up districts, 
which generally are changed but slightly from 
year to year, and the times and places for the 
round-ups to begin refixed so that those of 



The Round-up 73 

adjacent districts may be run with a view to the 
best interests of all. Thus the stockmen along 
the Yellowstone have one round-up; we along 
the Little IMissouri have another ; and the country 
lying between, through which the Big Beaver 
flows, is almost equally important to both. 
Accordingly, one spring, the Little Missouri 
round-up, beginning May 25, and working down- 
stream, was timed so as to reach the mouth of 
the Big Beaver about June i, the Yellowstone 
rotmd-up beginning at that date and place. Both 
then worked up the Beaver together to its head, 
when the Yellowstone men turned to the west 
and we bent back to our own river; thus the 
bulk of the strayed cattle of each were brought 
back to their respective ranges. Our own 
round-up district covers the Big and Little 
Beaver creeks, which rise near each other, but 
empty into the Little ]\Iissouri nearly a hundred 
and fifty miles apart, and so much of the latter 
river as lies between their mouths. 

The captain or foreman of the round-up, upon 
whom very much of its efficiency and success 
depends, is chosen beforehand. He is, of course, 
an expert cowman, thoroughly acquainted with 
the country; and he must also be able to com- 
mand and to keep control of the wild rough- 
riders he has under him — a feat needing both 
tact and firmness. 



74 Ranch Life 

At the appointed day all meet at the place 
from which the round-up is to start. Each ranch, 
of course, has most work to be done in its own 
round-up district, but it is also necessary to have 
representatives in all those surrounding it. A 
large outfit may employ a dozen cowboys, or 
over, in the home district, and yet have nearly 
as many more representing its interest in the 
various ones adjoining. Smaller outfits generally 
club together to run a wagon and send outside 
representatives, or else go along with their 
stronger neighbors, they paying part of the 
expenses. A large outfit, with a herd of twenty 
thousand cattle or more, can, if necessary, run a 
roimd-up entirely by itself, and is able to act 
independently of outside help; it is therefore at 
a great advantage compared with those that can 
take no step effectively without their neighbors' 
consent and assistance. 

If the starting-point is some distance off, it may 
be necessary to leave home three or four days in 
advance. Before this we have got everything in 
readiness ; have overhauled the wagons, shod any 
horse whose fore feet are tender, — as a rule, all 
our ponies go barefooted, — and left things in 
order at the ranch. Our outfit may be taken as 
a sample of every one else's. We have a stout 
four-horse wagon to carry the bedding and the 
food; in its rear a mess-chest is rigged to hold 



The Round-up 75 

the knives, forks, cans, etc. All our four team- 
horses are strong, willing animals, though of no 
great size, being originally just "broncos," or 
unbroken native horses, like the others. The 
teamster is also cook : a man who is a really first- 
rate hand at both driving and cooking — and our 
present teamster is both — can always command 
his price. Besides our own men, some cowboys 
from neighboring ranches and two or three rep- 
resentatives from other roimd-up districts are 
always along, and we generally have at least a 
dozen "riders," as they are termed, — that is, 
cowboys, or "cow-punchers," who do the actual 
cattle-work, — with the wagon. Each of these 
has a string of eight or ten ponies; and to take 
charge of the saddle-band, thus consisting of a 
himdred odd head, there are two herders, always 
known as "horse-wranglers" — one for the day 
and one for the night. Occasionally there will be 
two wagons, one to carry the bedding and one 
the food, known, respectively, as the bed and the 
mess wagon ; but this is not usual. 

While traveling to the meeting-point the pace 
is always slow, as it is an object to bnng the 
horses on the ground as fresh as possible. Accord- 
ingly we keep at a walk almost all day, and the 
riders, having nothing else to do, assist the 
wranglers in driving the saddle-band, three or 
four going in front, and others on the side, so 



76 Ranch Life 

that the horses shall keep on a walk. There is 
always some trouble with the animals at the 
starting out, as they are very fresh and are restive 
under the saddle. The herd is likely to stampede, 
and any beast that is frisky or vicious is sure to 
show its worst side. To do really effective cow- 
work a pony should be well broken ; but many 
even of the old ones have vicious traits, and almost 
every man will have in his string one or two 
young horses, or broncos, hardly broken at all. 
Thanks to the rough methods of breaking in 
vogue on the plains many even of the so-called 
broken animals retain always certain bad habits, 
the most common being that of bucking. Of the 
sixty odd horses on my ranch all but half a dozen 
were broken by ourselves; and though my men 
are all good riders, yet a good rider is not neces- 
sarily a good horse-breaker, and indeed it was an 
absolute impossibility properly to break so many 
animals in the short time at our command — for 
we had to use them almost immediately after 
they were bought. In consequence, very many 
of my horses have to this day traits not likely to 
set a timid or a clumsy rider at his ease. One or 
two run away and cannot be held by even the 
strongest bit; others can hardly be bridled or 
saddled until they have been thrown ; two or 
three have a tendency to fall over backward ; and 
half of them buck more or less, some so hard that 



The Round-up 77 

only an expert can sit them ; several I never ride 
myself, save from dire necessity. 

In riding these wild, vicious horses, and in 
careering over such very bad ground, especially 
at night, accidents are always occurring. A man 
who is merely an ordinary rider is certain to have 
a pretty hard time. On my first round-up I had 
a string of nine horses, four of them broncos, only 
broken to the extent of having each been saddled 
once or twice. One of them it was an impossi- 
bility to bridle or to saddle single-handed ; it was 
very difficult to get on or off him, and he was 
exceedingly nervous if a man moved his hands 
or feet; but he had no bad tricks. The second 
soon became perfectly quiet. The third turned 
out to be one of the worst buckers on the ranch : 
once, when he bucked me off, I managed to fall 
on a stone, and broke a rib. The fourth had a 
still worse habit, for he would balk and then 
throw himself over backward : once, when I was 
not quick enough, he caught me and broke some- 
thing in the point of my shoulder, so that it 
was some weeks before I could raise the arm 
freely. My hurts were far from serious, and did 
not interfere with my riding and working as usual 
through the round-up; but I was heartily glad 
when it ended, and ever since have religiously 
done my best to get none but gentle horses in 
my own string. However, every one gets falls 



yS Ranch Life 

from or with his horse now and then in the cow 
country; and even my men, good riders though 
they are, are sometimes injured. One of them 
once broke his ankle ; another a rib ; another was 
on one occasion stunned, remaining unconscious 
for some hours; and yet another had certain of 
his horses buck under him so hard and long as 
finally to hurt his lungs and make him cough 
blood. Fatal accidents occur annually in almost 
every district, especially if there is much work to 
be done among stampeded cattle at night; but 
on my own ranch none of my men have ever been 
seriously hurt, though on one occasion a cowboy 
from another ranch, who was with my wagon, 
was killed, his horse falling and pitching him 
heavily on his head. 

For bedding, each man has two or three pairs 
of blankets, and a tarpaulin or small wagon- 
sheet. Usually, two or three sleep together. 
Even in June the nights are generally cool and 
pleasant, and it is chilly in the early mornings; 
although this is not always so, and when the 
weather stays hot and mosquitoes are plenty, the 
hours of darkness, even in midsummer, seem pain- 
fully long. In the Bad Lands proper we are not 
often bothered very seriously by these winged 
pests ; but in the low bottoms of the Big Missouri, 
and beside many of the reedy ponds and great 
sloughs out on the prairie, they are a perfect 



The Round-up y^ 

scourge. During the very hot nights, when they 
are especially active, the bed-clothes make a man 
feel absolutely smothered, and yet his only chance 
for sleep is to wrap himself tightly up, head and 
all ; and even then some of the pests will usually 
force their way in. At simset I have seen the 
mosquitoes rise up from the land like a dense 
cloud, to make the hot, stifling night one long 
torture; the horses would neither lie down nor 
graze, traveling restlessly to and fro till day- 
break, their bodies streaked and bloody, and the 
insects settling on them so as to make them all 
one color, a uniform gray; while the men, after 
a few hours' tossing about in the vain attempt to 
sleep, rose, built a little fire of damp sage brush, 
and thus endured the misery as best they could 
until it was light enough to work. 

But if the weather is fine, a man will never 
sleep better nor more pleasantly than in the open 
air after a hard day's work on the roujid-up ; nor 
will an ordinary shower or gust of wind disturb 
him in the least, for he simply draws the tarpaulin 
over his head and goes on sleeping. But now and 
then we have a wind-storm that might better be 
called a whirlwind and has to be met very differ- 
ently; and two or three days or nights of rain 
insure the wetting of the blankets, and therefore 
shivering discomfort on the part of the would-be 
sleeper. For two or three hours all goes well; 



8o Ranch Life 

and it is rather soothing to listen to the steady 
patter of the great raindrops on the canvas. But 
then it will be found that a comer has been left 
open through which the water can get in, or else 
the tarpaulin will begin to leak somewhere; or 
perhaps the water will have collected in a hollow 
underneath and have begun to soak through. 
Soon a little stream trickles in, and every effort 
to remedy matters merely results in a change for 
the worse. To move out of the way insures 
getting wet in a fresh spot; and the best course 
is to lie still and accept the evils that have come 
with what fortitude one can. Even thus, the 
first night a man can sleep pretty well; but if 
the rain continues, the second night, when the 
blankets are already damp, and when the water 
comes through more easily, is apt to be most 
unpleasant. 

Of course, a man can take little spare clothing 
on a round-up ; at the very outside two or three 
clean handkerchiefs, a pair of socks, a change of 
tmderclothes, and the most primitive kind of 
washing apparatus, all wrapped up in a stout 
jacket which is to be worn when night-herding. 
The inevitable "slicker," or oil-skin coat, which 
gives complete protection from the wet, is always 
carried behind the saddle. 

At the meeting-place there is usually a delay 
of a day or two to let every one come in; and 



The Round-up 8i 

the plain on which the encampment is made 
becomes a scene of great bustle and turmoil. 
The hea\y four-horse wagons jolt in from dif- 
ferent quarters, the horse-wranglers rushing madly 
to and fro in the endeavor to keep the different 
saddle-bands from mingling, while the "riders," 
or cowboys, with each wagon jog along in a body. 
The representatives from outside districts ride in 
singly or by twos and threes, every man driving 
before him his own horses, one of them loaded 
with his bedding. Each wagon wheels out of the 
way into some camping-place not too near the 
others, the bedding is tossed out on the ground, 
and then every one is left to do what he wishes, 
while the different wagon bosses, or foremen, seek 
out the captain of the round-up to learn what his 
plans are. 

There is a good deal of rough but effective dis- 
cipline and method in the way in which a round-up 
is carried on. The captain of the whole has as 
lieutenants the various wagon foremen, and in 
making demands for men to do some special ser- 
vice he will usually merely designate some foreman 
to take charge of the work and let him parcel it 
out among his men to suit himself. The captain 
of the round-up or the foreman of a wagon may 
himself be a ranchman ; if such is not the case, 
and the ranchman nevertheless comes along, he 
works and fares precisely as do the other cowboys. 
6 



g2 Ranch Life 

While the head men are gathered in a little 
knot, planning out the work, the others are dis- 
persed over the plain in every direction, racing, 
breaking rough horses, or simply larking with one 
another. If a man has an especially bad horse, 
he usually takes such an opportunity, when he 
has plenty of time, to ride him ; and while saddling 
he is surrounded by a crowd of most imsympa- 
thetic associates who greet with uproarious mirth 
any misadventure. A man on a bucking horse is 
always considered fair game, every squeal and 
jump of the bronco being hailed with cheers of 
delighted irony for the rider and shouts to "stay 
with him." The antics of a vicious bronco show 
infinite variety of detail, but are all modeled on 
one general plan. When the rope settles round 
his neck the fight begins, and it is only after much 
plunging and snorting that a twist is taken over 
his nose, or else a hackamore — a species of severe 
halter., usually made of plaited hair — slipped on 
his head. While being bridled he strikes viciously 
with his fore feet, and perhaps has to be blind- 
folded or thrown down ; and to get the saddle on 
him is quite as difficult. When saddled, he may 
get rid of his exuberant spirits by bucking imder 
the saddle, or may reserve all his energies for the 
rider. In the last case, the man keeping tight 
hold with his left hand of the cheek-strap, so as 
to prevent the horse from getting his head down 



The Round-up 83 

until he is fairly seated, swings himself quickly 
into the saddle. Up rises the bronco's back into 
an arch; his head, the ears laid straight back, 
goes down between his fore feet, and, squealing 
savagely, he makes a succession of rapid, stiff- 
legged, jarring bounds. Sometimes he is a 
"plunging" bucker, who runs forward all the 
time while bucking; or he may buck steadily in 
one place, or "sun-fish," — that is, bring first one 
shoulder down almost to the ground and then the 
other, — or else he may change ends while in the 
air. A first-class rider will sit throughout it all 
without moving from the saddle, quirting' his 
horse all the time, though his hat may be jarred 
off his head and his revolver out of its sheath. 
After a few jumps, however, the average man 
grasps hold of the horn of the saddle — the de- 
lighted onlookers meanwhile earnestly advising 
him not to "go to leather" — and is contented to 
get through the affair in any shape provided he 
can escape without being thrown off. An acci- 
dent is of necessity borne with a broad grin, as 
any attempt to resent the raillery of the by- 
standers — which is perfectly good-humored — 
would be apt to result disastrously. Cowboys 
are certainly extremely good riders. x\s a class 
they have no superiors. Of course, they would 

'Quirt is the name of the short flexible riding-whip used 
throughout cowboy land. The term is a Spanish one. 



84 Ranch Life 

at first be at a disadvantage in steeple-chasing 
or fox-hunting, but their average of horseman- 
ship is without doubt higher than that of the men 
who take part in these latter amusements. A 
cowboy would learn to ride across coimtry in a 
quarter of the time it would take a cross-country 
rider to learn to handle a vicious bronco or to do 
good cow-work round and in a herd. 

On such a day, when there is no regular work, 
there will often also be horse-races, as each outfit 
is pretty sure to have some running pony which 
it believes can outpace any other. These con- 
tests are always short-distance dashes, for but a 
few hundred yards. Horse-racing is a mania with 
most plainsmen, white or red. A man with a 
good racing pony will travel all about with it, 
often winning large sums, visiting alike cow 
ranches, frontier towns, and Indian encampments. 
Sometimes the race is "pony against pony," the 
victor taking both steeds. In racing the men 
ride bareback, as there are hardly any light saddles 
in the cow country. There w411 be intense ex- 
citement and very heavy betting over a race 
between two well-known horses, together mth a 
good chance of blood being shed in the attendant 
quarrels. Indians and whites often race against 
each other as well as among themselves. I have 
seen several such contests, and in every case but 
one the white man happened to win. A race is 



The Round-up 85 

usually run between two thick rows of spectators, 
on foot and on horseback, and as the racers pass, 
these rows close in behind them, every man 
yelling and shouting with all the strength of his 
limgs, and all waving their hats and cloaks to 
encourage the contestants, or firing off their 
revolvers and saddle gims. The little horses are 
fairly maddened, as is natural enough, and run 
as if they were crazy: were the distances longer 
some would be sure to drop in their tracks. 

Besides the horse-races, which are, of course, 
the main attraction, the men at a round-up will 
often get up wrestling matches or foot-races. In 
fact, every one feels that he is off for a holiday; 
for after the monotony of a long winter, the 
cowboys look forward eagerly to the round-up, 
where the work is hard, it is true, but exciting 
and varied, and treated a good deal as a frolic. 
There is no eight-hour law in cowboy land: 
during round-up time we often coimt ourselves 
lucky if we get off with much less than sixteen 
hours; but the work is done in the saddle, and 
the men are spurred on all the time by the desire 
to outdo one another in feats of daring and skilful 
horsemanship. There is very little quarreling or 
fighting ; and though the fim often takes the form 
of rather rough horse-play, yet the practice of 
carrying dangerous weapons makes cowboys show 
far more rough courtesy to each other and far 



86 Ranch Life 

less rudeness to strangers than is the case among, 
for instance, Eastern miners, or even lumbermen. 
When a quarrel may very probably result fatally, 
a man thinks twice before going into it : warlike 
people or classes always treat one another with a 
certain amount of consideration and politeness. 
The moral tone of a cow-camp, indeed, is rather 
high than otherwise. ]\Ieanness, cowardice, and 
dishonesty are not tolerated. There is a high 
regard for truthfulness and keeping one's word, 
intense contempt for any kind of hypocrisy, and 
a hearty dislike for a man who shirks his work. 
Many of the men gamble and drink, but many 
do neither; and the conversation is not worse 
than in most bodies composed wholly of male 
human beings. A cowboy will not submit tamely 
to an insult, and is ever ready to avenge his own 
wrongs; nor has he an overwrought fear of 
shedding blood. He possesses, in fact, few of the 
emasculated, milk-and-water moralities admired 
by the pseudo-philanthropists ; but he does pos- 
sess, to a very high degree, the stem, manly 
qualities that are invaluable to a nation. 

The method of work is simple. The mess- 
wagons and loose horses, after breaking camp in 
the morning, move on in a straight line for some 
few miles, going into camp again before midday; 
and the day herd, consisting of all the cattle that 
have been found far off their range, and which 



The Round-up 87 

are to be brought back there, and of any others 
that it is necessary to gather, follows on afterward. 
Meanwhile the cowboys scatter out and drive in 
all the cattle from the country round about, going 
perhaps ten or fifteen miles back from the line of 
march, and meeting at the place where camp has 
already been pitched. The wagons always keep 
some little distance from one another, and the 
saddle-bands do the same, so that the horses may 
not get mixed. It is rather picturesque to see 
the four-horse teams filing down at a trot through 
a pass among the buttes — the saddle-bands being 
driven along at a smart pace to one side or behind, 
the teamsters cracking their whips, and the horse- 
wranglers calling and shouting as they ride rapidly 
from side to side behind the horses, urging on the 
stragglers by dexterous touches with the knotted 
ends of their long lariats that are left trailing from 
the saddle. The country driven over is very 
rough, and it is often necessary to double up 
teams and put on eight horses to each wagon in 
going up an unusually steep pitch, or hauling 
through a deep mud-hole, or over a river crossing 
where there is quicksand. 

The speed and thoroughness with which a 
country can be worked depends, of course, very 
largely upon the number of riders. Ours is 
probably about an average roimd-up as regards 
size. The last spring I was out, there were half 



88 Ranch Life 

a dozen wagons along; the saddle-bands num- 
bered about a hundred each ; and the morning 
we started, sixty men in the saddle splashed 
across the shallow ford of the river that divided 
the plain where we had camped from the valley 
of the long winding creek up which we were first 
to work. 

In the morning the cook is preparing breakfast 
long before the first glimmer of dawn. As soon 
as it is ready, probably about three o'clock, he 
utters a long-drawn shout, and all the sleepers feel 
it is time to be up on the instant, for they know 
there can be no such thing as delay on the 
roimd-up, under penalty of being set afoot. 
Accordingly, they bundle out, rubbing their eyes 
and yawning, draw on their boots and trousers, — 
if they have taken the latter off, — roll up and 
cord their bedding, and usually without any 
attempt at washing crowd over to the little 
smoldering fire, which is placed in a hole dug in 
the groimd, so that there may be no risk of its 
spreading. The men are rarely very himgry at 
breakfast, and it is a meal that has to be eaten 
in shortest order, so it is perhaps the least im- 
portant. Each man, as he comes up, grasps a 
tin cup and plate from the mess-box, pours out 
his tea or coffee, with sugar, but, of course, no 
milk, helps himself to one or two of the biscuits 
that have been baked in a Dutch oven, and per- 



The Round-up 89 

haps also to a slice of the fat pork swimming in 
the grease of the frying-pan, ladles himself out 
some beans, if there are any, and squats down on 
the groimd to eat his breakfast. The meal is not 
an elaborate one; nevertheless a man will have 
to hurry if he wishes to eat it before hearing the 
foreman sing out, "Come, boys, catch your 
horses;" when he must drop ever^'thing and run 
out to the wagon with his lariat. The night 
wrangler is now bringing in the saddle-band, 
which he has been up all night guarding. A rope 
corral is rigged up by stretching a rope from each 
wheel of one side of the wagon, making a V-shaped 
space, into which the saddle-horses are driven. 
Certain men stand around to keep them inside, 
while the others catch the horses: many outfits 
have one man to do all the roping. As soon as 
each has caught his horse — usually a strong, tough 
animal, the small, quick ponies being reserved for 
the work round the herd in the afternoon — the 
band, now in charge of the day wrangler, is turned 
loose, and every one saddles up as fast as possible. 
It still lacks some time of being sunrise, and the 
air has in it the peculiar chill of the early morning. 
When all are saddled, many of the horses bucking 
and dancing about, the riders from the different 
wagons all assemble at the one where the captain 
is sitting, already mounted. He waits a very short 
time — for laggards receive but scant mercy — ■ 



90 Ranch Life 

before announcing the proposed camping-place 
and parceling out the work among those present. 
If, as is usually the case, the line of march is 
along a river or creek, he appoints some man to 
take a dozen others and drive down (or up) it 
ahead of the day herd, so that the latter will not 
have to travel through other cattle ; the day herd 
itself being driven and guarded by a dozen men 
detached for that purpose. The rest of the riders 
are divided into two bands, placed under men 
who know the cotintry, and start out, one on each 
side, to bring in every head for fifteen miles back. 
The captain then himself rides down to the new 
camping-place, so as to be there as soon as any 
cattle are brought in. 

Meanwhile the two bands, a score of riders in 
each, separate and make their way in opposite 
directions. The leader of each tries to get such a 
"scatter" on his men that they will cover com- 
pletely all the land gone over. This morning work 
is called circle riding, and is peculiarly hard in the 
Bad Lands on account of the remarkably broken, 
rugged nature of the country. The men come in 
on lines that tend to a common center — as if the 
sticks of a fan were curved. As the band goes 
out, the leader from time to time detaches one or 
two men to ride down through certain sections 
of the country, making the shorter, or what are 
called inside, circles, while he keeps on; and 



The Round-up 91 

finally, retaining as companions the two or there 
whose horses are toughest, makes the longest 
or outside circle himself, going clear back to the 
divide, or whatever the point may be that marks 
the limit of the rotmd-up work, and then turning 
and working straight to the meeting-place. Each 
man, of course, brings in every head of cattle he 
can see. 

These long, swift rides in the glorious spring 
mornings are not soon to be forgotten. The 
sweet, fresh air, with a touch of sharpness thus 
early in the day, and the rapid motion of the 
fiery little horse combine to make a man's blood 
thrill and leap with sheer buoyant lighthearted- 
ness and eager, exultant pleasure in the boldness 
and freedom of the life he is leading. As we climb 
the steep sides of the first range of buttes, wisps 
of wavering mist still cling in the hollows of the 
valley ; when we come out on the top of the first 
great plateau, the sun flames up over its edge, and 
in the level, red beams the galloping horsemen 
throw long fantastic shadows. Black care rarely 
sits behind a rider whose pace is fast enough ; at 
any rate, not when he first feels the horse move 
under him. 

Sometimes we trot or pace, and again we lope 
or gallop; the few who are to take the outside 
circle must needs ride both hard and fast. Al- 
though only grass-fed, the horses are tough and 



92 Ranch Life 

wiry; and, moreover, are each used but once in 
four days, or thereabouts, so they stand the work 
well. The course out lies across great grassy pla- 
teaus, along knife-like ridge crests, among winding 
valleys and ravines, and over acres of barren, sim- 
scorched buttes, that look grimly grotesque and 
forbidding, while in the Bad Lands the riders 
unhesitatingly go down and over places where 
it seems impossible that a horse should even stand. 
The line of horsemen will quarter down the side 
of a butte, where every pony has to drop from 
ledge to ledge like a goat, and will go over the 
shoulder of a soapstone cliff, when wet and slip- 
pery, with a series of plunges and scrambles which 
if unsuccessful would land horses and riders in the 
bottom of the canyon-like washout below. In de- 
scending a clay butte after a rain, the pony will 
put all four feet together and slide down to the 
bottom almost or quite on his haunches. In very 
wet weather the Bad Lands are absolutely im- 
passable ; but if the grotmd is not slippery, it is a 
remarkable place that can shake the matter-of- 
course confidence felt by the rider in the capacity 
of his steed to go anywhere. 

When the men on the outside circle have 
reached the bound set them, — whether it is a 
low divide, a group of jagged hills, the edge of 
the rolling, limitless prairie, or the long, waste 
reaches of alkali and sage brush, — they turn their 



The Round-up 93 

horses' heads and begin to work down the branches 
of the creeks, one or two riding down the bottom, 
while the others keep off to the right and the left, 
a little ahead and fairly high up on the side hills, 
so as to command as much of a view as possible. 
On the level or rolling prairies the cattle can be 
seen a long way off, and it is an easy matter to 
gather and to drive them ; but in the Bad Lands 
every little pocket, basin, and coulee has to be 
searched, every gorge or ravine entered, and the 
dense patches of brushwood and spindling, wind- 
beaten trees closely examined. All the cattle are 
carried on ahead down the creek ; and it is curious 
to watch the different behavior of the different 
breeds. A cowboy riding off to one side of the 
creek, and seeing a number of long-homed Texans 
grazing in the branches of a set of coulees, has 
merely to ride across the upper ends of these, 
uttering the drawn-out "ei-koh-h-h," so familiar 
to the cattlemen, and the long-horns will stop 
grazing, stare fixedly at him, and then, wheeling, 
strike off down the coulees at a trot, tails in air, 
to be carried along by the center riders when they 
reach the main creek into which the coulees lead. 
Our o\\Tii range cattle are not so wild, but never- 
theless are easy to drive; while Eastern-raised 
beasts have little fear of a horseman, and merely 
stare stupidly at him until he rides directly to- 
ward them. Everv little bunch of stock is thus 



94 Ranch Life 

collected, and all are driven along together. At the 
place where some large fork joins the main creek 
another band may be met, driven by some of the 
men who have left earlier in the day to take one of 
the shorter circles ; and thus, before coming down 
to the bottom where the wagons are camped 
and where the actual "round-up" itself is to take 
place, this one herd may include a couple of thou- 
sand head ; or, on the other hand, the longest ride 
may not result in the finding of a dozen animals. 
As soon as the riders are in, they disperse to their 
respective wagons to get dinner and change horses, 
leaving the cattle to be held by one or two of their 
number. If only a small number of cattle have 
been gathered, they will all be run into one herd ; 
if there are many of them, however, the different 
herds will be held separate. 

A plain where a round-up is taking place offers 
a picturesque sight. I well remember one such. 
It was on a level bottom in a bend of the river, 
which here made an almost semicircular sweep. 
The bottom was in shape a long oval, hemmed in 
by an unbroken line of steep bluffs so that it 
looked like an amphitheater. Across the faces of 
the dazzling white cliffs there were sharp bands 
of black and red, drawn by the coal seams and 
the layers of burned clay : the leaves of the trees 
and the grass had the vivid green of spring-time. 
The wagons were camped among the cottonwood 



The Round-Up 95 

trees fringing the river, a thin column of smoke 
rising up from beside each. The horses were 
grazing round the outskirts, those of each wagon 
by themselves and kept from going too near the 
others by their watchful guard. In the great 
circular corral, toward one end, the men were 
already branding calves, while the whole middle 
of the bottom was covered with lowing herds of 
cattle and shouting, galloping cowboys. Appar- 
ently there was nothing but dust, noise, and con- 
fusion ; but in reality the work was proceeding all 
the while with the utmost rapidity and certainty. 

As soon as, or even before, the last circle riders 
have come in and have snatched a few hasty 
mouthfuls to serve as their midday meal, we 
begin to work the herd — or herds, if the one herd 
would be of too tmwieldy size. The animals are 
held in a compact btmch, most of the riders form- 
ing a ring outside, while a couple from each ranch 
successively look the herds through and cut out 
those marked with their own brand. It is diffi- 
cult, in such a mass of moving beasts, — for they 
do not stay still, but keep weaving in and out 
among each other, — to find all of one's own ani- 
mals: a man must have natural gifts, as well as 
great experience, before he becomes a good brand- 
reader and is able really to "clean up a herd" — 
that is, be sure he has left nothing of his own in it. 

To do good work in cutting out from a herd. 



96 Ranch Life 

not only should the rider be a good horseman, but 
he should also have a skilful, thoroughly trained 
horse. A good cutting pony is not common, and 
is generally too valuable to be used anyw^here but 
in the herd. Such a one enters thoroughly into 
the spirit of the thing, and finds out immediately 
the animal his master is after ; he will then follow 
it closely of his own accord through every wheel 
and double at top speed. When looking through 
the herd, it is necessary to move slowly ; and when 
any animal is found it is taken to the outskirts at 
a walk, so as not to alarm the others. Once at the 
outside, however, the cowboy has to ride like light- 
ning ; for as soon as the beast he is after finds itself 
separated from its companions it endeavors to 
break back among them, and a young, range- 
raised steer or heifer runs like a deer. In cutting 
out a cow and a calf two men have to work 
together. As the animals of a brand are cut out 
they are received and held apart by some rider 
detailed for the purpose, who is said to be "hold- 
ing the cut." 

All this time the men holding the herd have 
their hands full, for some animal is continually 
trying to break out, when the nearest man flies 
at it at once and after a smart chase brings it back 
to its fellows. As soon as all the cows, calves, and 
whatever else is being gathered have been cut out, 
the rest are driven clear off the ground and turned 



The Round-up 97 

loose, being headed in the direction contrary to 
that in which we travel the following day. Then 
the riders surround the next herd, the men hold- 
ing cuts move them up near it, and the work is 
begim anew. 

If it is necessary to throw an animal, either to 
examine a brand or for any other reason, half a 
dozen men will have their ropes down at once; 
and then it is spur and quirt in the rivalry to see 
which can outdo the other until the beast is roped 
and thro\vn. A first-class hand w411, unaided, 
rope, throw, and tie down a cow or steer in won- 
derfully short time; one of the favorite tests of 
competitive skill among the cowboys is the speed 
with which this feat can be accomplished. Usually, 
however, one man ropes the animal by the head 
and another at the same time gets the loop of his 
lariat over one or both its hind legs, when it is 
twisted over and stretched out in a second. In 
following an animal on horseback the man keeps 
steadily swinging the rope round his head, by a 
dexterous motion of the wrist only, until he gets 
a chance to throw it; when on foot, especially if 
catching horses in a corral, the loop is allowed to 
drag loosely on the ground. A good roper will 
hurl out the coil with marvelous accuracy and 
force; it fairly whistles through the air, and 
settles roimd the object with almost infallible 
certaintv. Mexicans make the best ropers; but 



98 Ranch Life 

some Texans are very little behind them. A good 
horse takes as much interest in the work as does 
his rider, and, the instant the noose settles over 
the victim, wheels and braces himself to meet the 
shock, standing with his legs firmly planted, the 
steer or cow being thrown with a jerk. An un- 
skilful rider and imtrained horse will often them- 
selves be thrown when the strain comes. 

Sometimes an animal — usually a cow or steer, 
but, strangely enough, very rarely a bull — will get 
fighting mad, and turn on the men. If on the 
drive, such a beast usually is simply dropped out ; 
but if they have time, nothing delights the cow- 
boys more than an encounter of this sort, and the 
charging brute is roped and tied down in short 
order. Often such a one will make a very vicious 
fight, and is most dangerous. Once a fighting cow 
kept several of us busy for nearly an hour; she 
gored two ponies, one of them, which was, luckily, 
hurt but slightly, being my own pet cutting horse. 
If a steer is hauled out of a mud-hole, its first act 
is usually to charge the rescuer. 

As soon as all the brands of cattle are worked, 
and the animals that are to be driven along have 
been put in the day herd, attention is turned to 
the cows and calves, which are already gathered 
in different bands, consisting each of all the cows 
of a certain brand and all the calves that are fol- 
lowing them. If there is a corral, each band is in 



The Round-up 99 

turn driven into it; if there is none, a ring of 
riders does duty in its place. A fire is built, the 
irons heated, and a dozen men dismount to, as it 
is called, "wrestle" the calves. The best two 
ropers go in on their horses to catch the latter; 
one man keeps tally, a couple put on the brands, 
and the others seize, throw, and hold the little 
unfortunates. A first-class roper invariably 
catches the calf by both hind feet, and then, 
having taken a twist with his lariat round the 
horn of the saddle, drags the bawling little 
creature, extended at full length, up to the fire, 
where it is held, before it can make a struggle. 
A less skilful roper catches round the neck, and 
then, if the calf is a large one, the man who seizes 
it has his hands full, as the bleating, bucking ani- 
mal develops astonishing strength, cuts the 
wildest capers, and resists frantically and with 
all its power. If there are seventy or eighty 
calves in a corral, the scene is one of the greatest 
confusion. The ropers, spurring and checking the 
fierce little horses, drag the calves up so quickly 
that a dozen men can hardly hold them ; the men 
with the irons, blackened with soot, run to and 
fro; the calf -wrestlers, grimy with blood, dust, 
and sweat, work like beavers; while with the 
voice of a stentor the tallyman shouts out the 
number and sex of each calf. The dust rises in 
clouds, and the shouts, cheers, curses, and laughter 



loo Ranch Life 

of the men unite with the lowing of the cows 
and the frantic bleating of the roped calves to 
make a perfect babel. Now and then an old cow 
turns vicious and puts every one out of the corral. 
Or a maverick bull, — that is, an unbranded bull, — 
a yearling or a two-years-old, is caught, thrown, 
and branded; when he is let up there is sure to 
be a fine scatter. Down goes his head, and he 
bolts at the nearest man, who makes out of the 
way at top speed, amidst roars of laughter from 
all of his companions; while the men holding 
down calves swear savagely as they dodge charg- 
ing mavericks, trampling horses, and taut lariats 
with frantic, pliinging little beasts at the farther 
ends. 

Every morning certain riders are detached to 
drive and to guard the day herd, which is most 
monotonous work, the men being on from four 
in the morning till eight in the evening, the only 
rest coming at dinner-time, when they change 
horses. When the herd has reached the camping- 
ground there is nothing to do but to loll listlessly 
over the saddle-bow in the blazing sim watching 
the cattle feed and sleep, and seeing that they do 
not spread out too much. Plodding slowly along 
on the trail through the columns of dust stirred up 
by the hoofs is not much better. Cattle travel 
best and fastest strung out in long lines; the 
swiftest taking the lead in single file, while the 



The Round-up loi 

weak and the lazy, the young calves and the poor 
cows, crowd together in the rear. Two men travel 
along with the leaders, one on each side, to point 
them in the right direction; one or two others 
keep by the flanks, and the rest are in the rear to 
act as "drag-drivers" and hurry up the phalanx 
of reluctant weaklings. If the foremost of the 
string travels too fast, one rider will go along on 
the trail a few rods ahead, and thus keep them 
back so that those in the rear will not be left behind. 
Generally all this is very tame and irksome; 
but by fits and starts there will be little flurries 
of excitement. Two or three of the circle riders 
may imexpectedly come over a butte near by 
with a bimch of cattle, which at once start for the 
day herd, and then there will be a few minutes' 
furious riding hither and thither to keep them out. 
Or the cattle may begin to run, and then get 
"milling" — that is, all crowd together into a 
mass like a ball, wherein they move round and 
round, trying to keep their heads toward the 
center, and refusing to leave it. The only way 
to start them is to force one's horse in among 
them and cut out some of their number, which 
then begin to travel off by themselves, when the 
others will probably follow. But in spite of occa- 
sional incidents of this kind, day-herding has a 
dreary sameness about it that makes the men 
dislike and seek to avoid it. 



I02 Ranch Life 

From eight in the evening till four in the morn- 
ing the day herd becomes a night herd. Each 
wagon in succession undertakes to guard it for a 
night, dividing the time into watches of two hours 
apiece, a couple of riders taking each watch. This 
is generally chilly and tedious ; but at times it is 
accompanied by intense excitement and danger, 
when the cattle become stampeded, whether by 
storm or otherwise. The first and the last watches 
are those chosen by preference ; the others are 
disagreeable, the men having to turn out cold and 
sleepy, in the pitchy darkness, the two hours of 
chilly wakefulness completely breaking the night's 
rest. The first guards have to bed the cattle 
down, though the day-herders often do this them- 
selves: it simply consists in hemming them into 
as small a space as possible, and then riding roimd 
them until they lie down and fall asleep. Often, 
especially at first, this takes some time — the 
beasts will keep rising and lying down again. 
When at last most become quiet, some perverse 
brute of a steer will deliberately hook them all up ; 
they keep moving in and out among one another, 
and long strings of animals suddenly start out 
from the herd at a stretching walk, and are turned 
back by the nearest cowboy only to break forth 
at a new spot. When finally they have lain 
down and are chewing their cud or slumbering, 
the two night guards begin riding round them in 



The Round-up 103 

opposite ways, often, on very dark nights, calling 
or singing to them, as the sound of the human 
voice on such occasions seems to have a tendency 
to quiet them. In inky black weather, especially 
when rainy, it is both difficult and unpleasant 
work ; the main trust must be placed in the horse, 
which, if old at the business, will of its own accord 
keep pacing steadily round the herd, and head off 
any animals that, unseen by the rider's eyes in 
the darkness, are trying to break out. Usually 
the watch passes off without incident, but on rare 
occasions the cattle become restless and prone to 
stampede. Anything may then start them — the 
plunge of a horse, the sudden approach of a coyote, 
or the arrival of some outside steers or cows that 
have smelt them and come up. Every animal in 
the herd will be on its feet in an instant, as if by an 
electric shock, and off with a rush, horns and tail 
up. Then, no matter how rough the ground nor 
how pitchy black the night, the cowboys must 
ride for all there is in them and spare neither 
their own nor their horses' necks. Perhaps their 
charges break away and are lost altogether ; per- 
haps, by desperate galloping, they may head them 
off, get them nmning in a circle, and finally stop 
them. Once stopped, they may break again, and 
possibly divide up, one cowboy, perhaps, follow- 
ing each band. I have known six such stops and 
renewed stampedes to take place in one night, the 



io4 Ranch Life 

cowboy staying with his ever-diminishing herd of 
steers until daybreak, when he managed to get 
them under control again, and, by careful humor- 
ing of his jaded, staggering horse, finally brought 
those that were left back to the camp, several 
miles distant. The riding in these night stam- 
pedes is wild and dangerous to a degree, espe- 
cially if the man gets caught in the rush of the 
beasts. It also frequently necessitates an im- 
mense amount of work in collecting the scattered 
animals. On one such occasion a small party of 
us were thirty-six hours in the saddle, dismount- 
ing only to change horses or to eat. We were 
almost worn out at the end of the time; but it 
must be kept in mind that for a long spell of such 
work a stock-saddle is far less tiring than the 
ordinary Eastern or English one, and in every way 
superior to it. 

By very hard riding, such a stampede may 
sometimes be prevented. Once we were bring- 
ing a thousand head of young cattle down to my 
lower ranch, and as the river was high were obliged 
to take the inland trail. The third night we were 
forced to make a dry camp, the cattle having had 
no water since the morning. Nevertheless, we got 
them bedded down without difficulty, and one of 
the cowboys and myself stood first guard. But 
very soon after nightfall, when the darkness had 
become complete, the thirsty biiites of one accord 



The Round-up 105 

got on their feet and tried to break out. The only 
salvation was to keep them close together, as, if 
they once got scattered, we knew they could never 
be gathered ; so I kept on one side, and the cow- 
boy on the other, and never in my life did I ride 
so hard. In the darkness I could but dimly see 
the shadowy outlines of the herd, as with whip and 
spurs I ran the pony along its edge, turning back 
the beasts at one point barely in time to wheel 
and keep them in at another. The ground was 
cut up by numerous little gullies, and each of us 
got several falls, horses and riders turning com- 
plete somersaults. We were dripping with sweat, 
and our ponies quivering and trembling like 
quaking aspens, when, after more than an hour 
of the most violent exertion, we finally got the 
herd quieted again. 

On another occasion while with the roimd-up 
we were spared an excessively unpleasant night 
only because there happened to be two or three 
great corrals not more than a mile or so away. 
AH day long it had been raining heavily, and we 
were well drenched ; but toward evening it lulled 
a Httle, and the day herd, a very large one, of 
some two thousand head, was gathered on an 
open bottom. We had turned the horses loose, 
and in our oilskin slickers cowered, soaked and 
comfortless, under the lee of the wagon, to take 
a meal of damp bread and lukewarm tea, the 



io6 Ranch Life 

sizzling embers of the fire having about given up 
the ghost after a fruitless struggle with the steady 
downpour. Suddenly the wind began to come in 
quick, sharp gusts, and soon a regular blizzard 
was blowing, driving the rain in stinging level 
sheets before it. Just as we were preparing to 
turn into bed, with the certainty of a night of 
more or less chilly misery ahead of us, one of my 
men, an iron-faced personage, whom no one would 
ever have dreamed had a weakness for poetry, 
looked toward the plain where the cattle were, and 
remarked, " I guess there's 'racing and chasing on 
Cannobie Lea' now, sure." Following his gaze, 
I saw that the cattle had begun to drift before the 
storm, the night guards being evidently unable to 
cope with them, while at the other wagons riders 
were saddling in hot haste and spurring off to their 
help through the blinding rain. Some of us at 
once ran out to our own saddle-band. All of the 
ponies were standing huddled together, with their 
heads down and their tails to the wind. They 
were wild and restive enough usually; but the 
storm had cowed them, and we were able to catch 
them without either rope or halter. We made 
quick work of saddling ; and the second each man 
was ready, away he loped through the dusk, 
splashing and slipping in the pools of water that 
studded the muddy plain. Most of the riders 
were already out when we arrived. The cattle 



The Round-up 107 

were gathered in a compact, wedge-shaped, or 
rather fan-shaped mass, with their tails to the 
wind — that is, toward the thin end of the wedge 
or fan. In front of this fan-shaped mass of 
frightened, maddened beasts was a long line 
of cowboys, each muffled in his slicker and with 
his broad hat pulled down over his eyes, to shield 
him from the pelting rain. When the cattle were 
quiet for a moment every horseman at once turned 
round with his back to the wind, and the whole 
line stood as motionless as so many sentries. Then, 
if the cattle began to spread out and overlap at 
the ends, or made a rush and broke through at 
one part of the lines, there would be a change into 
wild activity. The men, shouting and swaying in 
their saddles, darted to and fro with reckless speed, 
utterly heedless of danger — now racing to the 
threatened point, now checking and wheeling their 
horses so sharply as to bring them square on their 
haunches, or even throw them flat down, while 
the hoofs plowed long furrows in the slippery soil, 
until, after some minutes of this mad galloping 
hither and thither, the herd, having drifted a 
himdred yards or so, would be once more brought 
up standing. We always had to let them drift a 
little to prevent their spreading out too much. 
The din of the thunder was terrific, peal following 
peal imtil they mingled in one continuous, rum- 
bling roar ; and at every thimder-clap louder than 



io8 Ranch Life 

its fellows the cattle would try to break away. 
Darkness had set in, but each flash of lightning 
showed us a dense array of tossing horns and 
staring eyes. It grew always harder to hold in 
the herd ; but the drift took us along to the corrals 
already spoken of, whose entrances were luckily to 
windward. As soon as we reached the first we 
cut off part of the herd, and turned it within ; and 
after again doing this with the second, we were 
able to put all the remaining animals into the 
third. The instant the cattle were housed five- 
sixths of the horsemen started back at full speed 
for the wagons; the rest of us barely waited to 
put up the bars and make the corrals secure before 
galloping after them. We had to ride right in 
the teeth of the driving storm; and once at the 
wagons we made small delay in crawling imder 
our blankets, damp though the latter were, for 
we were ourselves far too wet, stiff, and cold not 
to hail with grateful welcome any kind of shelter 
from the wind and the rain. 

All animals were benumbed by the violence of 
this gale of cold rain : a prairie chicken rose from 
under my horse's feet so heavily that, thought- 
lessly striking at it, I cut it down with my whip ; 
while when a jack-rabbit got up ahead of us, it 
was barely able to limp clumsily out of our way. 

But though there is much work and hardship, 
rough fare, monotony, and exposure connected 



The Round-up 109 

with the round-up, yet there are few men who do 
not look forward to it and back to it with pleasure. 
The only fault to be found is that the hours of 
work are so long that one does not usually have 
enough time to sleep. The food, if rough, is good : 
beef, bread, pork, beans, coffee or tea, always 
canned tomatoes, and often rice, canned com, or 
sauce made from dried apples. The men are 
good-humored, bold, and thoroughly interested in 
their business, continually vying with one another 
in the effort to see which can do the work best. 
It is superbly health-giving, and is full of excite- 
ment and adventure, calling for the exhibition of 
pluck, self-reliance, hardihood, and dashing horse- 
manship ; and of all forms of physical labor the 
easiest and pleasantest is to sit in the saddle. 



CHAPTER V. 

WINTER WEATHER. 

WHEN the days have dwindled to their 
shortest, and the nights seem never 
ending, then all the great northern 
plains are changed into an abode of iron desola- 
tion. Sometimes furious gales blow out of the 
north, driving before them the clouds of blinding 
snowdust, wrapping the mantle of death round 
every unsheltered being that faces their un- 
shackled anger. They roar in a thunderous bass 
as they sweep across the prairie or whirl through 
the naked canyons ; they shiver the great brittle 
cottonwoods, and beneath their rough touch the 
icy limbs of the pines that cluster in the gorges 
sing like the chords of an ^olian harp. Again, 
in the coldest midwinter weather, not a breath of 
wind may stir; and then the still, merciless, 
terrible cold that broods over the earth like the 
shadow of silent death seems even more dreadful 
in its gloomy rigor than is the lawless madness of 
the storms. All the land is like granite; the 
great rivers stand still in their beds, as if turned 
to frosted steel. In the long nights there is no 
sound to break the lifeless silence. Under the 
ceaseless, shifting play of the Northern Lights, 

no 



Winter Weather m 

or lighted only by the wintry brilliance of the 
stars, the snow-clad plains stretch out into dead 
and endless wastes of glimmering white. 

Then the great fireplace of the ranch house is 
choked with blazing logs, and at night we have 
to sleep under so many blankets that the weight 
is fairly oppressive. Outside, the shaggy ponies 
huddle together in the corral, while long icicles 
hang from their lips, and the hoarfrost whitens 
the hollow backs of the cattle. For the ranchman 
the winter is occasionally a pleasant holiday, but 
more often an irksome period of enforced rest and 
gloomy foreboding. 

In the winter there is much less work than at 
any other season, but what there is involves great 
hardship and exposure. Many of the men are 
discharged after the summer is over, and during 
much of the cold weather there is little to do 
except hunt now and then, and in very bitter 
days lounge listlessly about the house. But 
some of the men are out in the line camps, and 
the ranchman has occasionally to make the round 
of these; and besides that, one or more of the 
cowboys who are at home ought to be out every 
day when the cattle have become weak, so as to 
pick up and drive in any beast that will otherwise 
evidently fail to get through the season — a cow 
that has had an unusually early calf being par- 
ticularly apt to need attention. The horses shift 



112 Ranch Life 

for themselves and need no help. Often, in 
winter, the Indians cut down the cottonwood 
trees and feed the tops to their ponies; but this 
is not done to keep them from starving, but only 
to keep them from wandering off in search of 
grass. Besides, the ponies are very fond of the 
bark of the yoimg cottonwood shoots, and it is 
healthy for them. 

The men in the line camps lead a hard life, for 
they have to be out in every kind of weather, and 
should be especially active and watchful during 
the storms. The camps are established along 
some line which it is proposed to make the boun- 
dary of the cattle's drift in a given direction. 
For example, we care very little whether our 
cattle wander to the Yellowstone ; but we strongly 
object to their drifting east and southeast toward 
the granger country and the Sioux reservation, 
especially as when they drift that way they come 
out on flat, bare plains where there is danger of 
perishing. Accordingly, the cowmien along the 
Little Missouri have united in establishing a row 
of camps to the east of the river, along the line 
where the broken ground meets the prairie. The 
camps are usually for two men each, and some 
fifteen or twenty miles apart; then, in the 
morning, its two men start out in opposite ways, 
each riding till he meets his neighbor of the next 
camp nearest on that side, when he returns. The 



Line Riding in Winter. 



.t we - 




'i:,C'<^ 



I 

I 



Winter Weather 113 

camp itself is sometimes merely a tent pitched in 
a sheltered coulee, but ought to be either made of 
logs or else a dug-out in the ground. A small 
corral and horse-shed is near by, with enough 
hay for the ponies, of which each rider has two 
or three. In riding over the beat each man drives 
any cattle that have come near it back into the 
Bad Lands, and if he sees by the hoof -marks that 
a few have strayed out over the line very recently, 
he will follow and fetch them home. They must 
be shoved well back into the Bad Lands before a 
great storm strikes them; for if they once begin 
to drift in masses before an icy gale it is impos- 
sible for a small number of men to hold them, 
and the only thing is to let them go, and then to 
organize an expedition to follow them as soon as 
possible. Line riding is very cold work, and 
dangerous too, when the men have to be out in 
a blinding snow-storm, or in a savage blizzard 
that takes the spirit in the thermometer far down 
below zero. In the worst storms it is impossible 
for any man to be out. 

But other kinds of work besides line riding 
necessitate exposure to bitter weather. Once, 
while spending a few days over on Beaver Creek 
hunting up a lost horse, I happened to meet a 
cowboy who was out on the same errand, and 
made friends with him. We started home to- 
gether across the open prairies, but were caught 
8 



114 Ranch Life 

in a very heavy snow-storm almost immediately 
after leaving the ranch where we had spent the 
night. We were soon completely turned round, 
the great soft flakes — for, luckily, it was not 
cold — almost blinding us, and we had to travel 
entirely by compass. After feeling our way along 
for eight or nine hours, we finally got down into 
the broken country near Sentinel Butte and came 
across an empty hut, a welcome sight to men as 
cold, hungry, and tired as we were. In this hut 
we passed the night very comfortably, picketing 
our horses in a sheltered nook near by, with 
plenty of hay from an old stack. To while away 
the long evening, I read Hamlet aloud, from a 
little pocket Shakespeare. The cowboy, a Texan, 
— one of the best riders I have seen, and also a 
very intelligent as well as a thoroughly good 
fellow in every way, — was greatly interested in it 
and commented most shrewdly on the parts he 
liked, especially Polonius's advice to Laertes, 
which he translated into more homely language 
with great relish, and ended with the just criticism 
that " old Shakspere saveyed htiman natur' some" 
— savey being a verb presumably adapted into the 
limited plains ' vocabulary from the Spanish. 

Even for those who do not have to look up stray 
horses, and who are not forced to ride the line day 
in and day out, there is apt to be some hardship 
and danger in being abroad during the bitter 



Winter Weather 115 

weather; yet a ride in midwinter is certainly 
fascinating. The great white country wrapped 
in the powdery snow-drift seems like another land ; 
and the familiar landmarks are so changed that a 
man must be careful lest he lose his way, for the 
discomfort of a night in the open during such 
weather is very great indeed. When the sun is 
out the glare from the endless white stretches daz- 
zles the eyes; and if the gray snow-clouds hang 
low and only let a pale, wan light struggle through, 
the lonely wastes become fairly appalling in their 
desolation. For hour after hour a man may go 
on and see no sign of life except, perhaps, a big 
white owl sweeping noiselessly by, so that in the 
dark it looks like a snow-wTeath; the cold grad- 
ually chilling the rider to the bones, as he draws 
his fur cap tight over his ears and muffles his face 
in the huge collar of his wolf -skin coat, and making 
the shaggy little steed drop head and tail as it 
picks its way over the frozen soil. There are few 
moments more pleasant than the home-coming, 
when, in the gathering darkness, after crossing 
the last chain of ice-covered buttes, or after coming 
roimd the last turn in the wind-swept valley, we 
see, through the leafless trees, or across the frozen 
river, the red gleam of the firelight as it shines 
through the ranch windows and flickers over the 
trunks of the cottonwoods outside, warming a 
man's blood by the mere hint of the warmth 



ii6 Ranch Life 

awaiting him within. The winter scenery is 
especially striking in the Bad Lands, with their 
queer fantastic formations. 

Among the most interesting features are the 
burning mines. These are formed by the coal seams 
that get on fire. They vary greatly in size. Some 
send up smoke-columns that are visible miles 
away, while others are not noticeable a few rods 
off. The old ones gradually bum away, while 
new ones unexpectedly break out. Thus, last fall, 
one suddenly appeared but half a mile from the 
ranch house. We never knew it was there imtil 
one cold moonlight night, when we were riding 
home, we rounded the comer of a ravine and saw 
in our path a tall white column of smoke rising 
from a rift in the snowy crags ahead of us. As 
the trail was over perfectly familiar groimd, we 
were for a moment almost as startled as if we had 
seen a ghost. 

The burning mines are uncanny places, anyhow, 
A strong smell of sulphur hangs roimd them, the 
heated earth crumbles and cracks, and through 
the long clefts that form in it we can see the lurid 
glow of the subterranean fires, with here and 
there tongues of blue or cherry colored flame 
dancing up to the surface. 

The winters vary greatly in severity with us. 
During some seasons men can go lightly clad even 
in January and February, and the cattle hardly 



Winter Weather 117 

suffer at all ; during others there will be spells of 
bitter weather, accompanied by furious blizzards, 
which render it impossible for days and weeks at 
a time for men to stir out-of-doors at all, save at 
the risk of their lives. Then line rider, ranchman, 
hunter, and teamster alike all have to keep within 
doors. I have known of several cases of men 
freezing to death when caught in shelterless 
places by such a blizzard, a strange fact being 
that in about half of them the doomed man had 
evidently gone mad before dying, and had stripped 
himself of most of his clothes, the body when 
found being nearly naked. On our ranch we have 
never had any bad accidents, although every 
winter some of us get more or less frost-bitten. 
My last experience in this line was while returning 
by moonlight from a successful hunt after moim- 
tain sheep. The thermometer was 26° below 
zero, and we had had no food for twelve hours. 
I became numbed, and before I was aware of it 
had frozen my face, one foot, both knees, and one 
hand. Luckily, I reached the ranch before serious 
damage was done. 

About once every six or seven years we have 
a season when these storms follow one another 
almost without interval throughout the winter 
months, and then the loss among the stock is 
frightful. One such winter occurred in 1880-81. 
This was when there were very few ranchmen in 



ii8 Ranch Life 

the country. The grass was so good that the old 
range stock escaped pretty well ; but the trail 
herds were almost destroyed. The next severe 
winter was that of 1886-87, when the rush of 
incoming herds had overstocked the ranges, and 
the loss was in consequence fairly appalling, 
especially to the outfits that had just put on cattle. 
The snow-fall was unprecedented, both for its 
depth and for the way it lasted ; and it was this, 
and not the cold, that caused the loss. About 
the middle of November the storms began. Day 
after day the snow came down, thawing and then 
freezing and piling itself higher and higher. By 
January the drifts had filled the ravines and 
coulees almost level. The snow lay in great 
masses on the plateaus and river-bottoms; and 
this lasted tmtil the end of February. The pre- 
ceding summer we had been visited by a pro- 
longed drought, so that the short, scanty grass 
was already w^ell cropped down ; the snow cov- 
ered what pasturage there was to the depth of 
several feet, and the cattle could not get at it at 
all, and could hardly move round. It was all but 
impossible to travel on horseback — except on a 
few well-beaten trails. It was dangerous to 
attempt to penetrate the Bad Lands, whose shape 
had been completely altered by the great white 
moimds and drifts. The starving cattle died by 
scores of thousands before their helpless owTiers' 



Winter Weather 119 

eyes. The bulls, the cows who were suckling 
calves, or who were heavy with calf, the weak 
cattle that had just been driven up on the trail, 
and the late calves suffered most; the old range 
animals did better, and the steers best of all ; but 
the best was bad enough. Even many of the 
horses died. An outfit near me lost half its 
saddle-band, the animals having been worked so 
hard that they were very thin when fall came. 

In the thick brush the stock got some shelter 
and sustenance. They gnawed every twig and 
bough they could get at. They browsed the 
bitter sage brush down to where the branches 
were the thickness of a man's finger. When near 
a ranch they crowded into the outhouses and 
sheds to die, and fences had to be built around 
the windows to keep the wild-eyed, desperate 
beasts from thrusting their heads through the 
glass panes. In most cases it was impossible 
either to drive them to the haystacks or to haul 
the hay out to them. The deer even were so 
weak as to be easily run down ; and on one or 
two of the plateaus where there were bands of 
antelope, these wary creatures grew so numbed 
and feeble that they could have been slaughtered 
like rabbits. But the himters could hardly get 
out, and could bring home neither hide nor meat, 
so the game went unharmed. 

The way in which the cattle got through the 



I20 Ranch Life 

winter depended largely on the different localities 
in which the bands were caught when the first 
heavy snows came. A group of animals in a bare 
valley, without tmderbrush and with steepish 
sides, would all die, weak and strong alike ; they 
could get no food and no shelter, and so there 
would not be a hoof left. On the other hand, 
hundreds wintered on the great thickly wooded 
bottoms near my ranch house with little more 
than ordinary loss, though a skinny sorr}^-looking 
crew by the time the snow melted. In inter- 
mediate places the strong survived and the weak 
perished. 

It would be impossible to imagine any sight 
more dreary and melancholy than that offered by 
the ranges when the snow went off in March. The 
land was a mere barren waste ; not a green thing 
could be seen; the dead grass eaten off till the 
country looked as if it had been shaved with a 
razor. Occasionally among the desolate hills a 
rider would come across a band of gaunt, hollow- 
flanked cattle feebly cropping the sparse, dry pas- 
turage, too listless to move out of the way; and 
the blackened carcasses lay in the sheltered spots, 
some stretched out, others in as natural a position 
as if the animals had merely lain down to rest. 
It was small wonder that cheerful stockmen were 
rare objects that spring. 

Our only comfort was that we did not, as usual, 



Winter \\'"eather 



121 



suffer a heavy loss from weak cattle getting mired 
dowTi in the springs and mud-holes when the ice 
broke up — for all the weak animals were dead 
already. The truth is, ours is a primitive indus- 
try, and we suffer the reverses as well as enjoy 
the successes only known to primitive peoples. 
A hard winter is to us in the north what a dry 
summer is to Texas or Australia — what seasons 
of famine once were to all peoples. We still live 
in an iron age that the old civilized world has long 
passed by. The men of the border reckon upon 
stem and unending struggles with their iron- 
bound surroimdings ; against the grim harshness 
of their existence they set the strength and the 
abounding vitality that come with it. They run 
risks to life and limb that are imknown to the 
dwellers in cities ; and what the men freely brave, 
the beasts that they own must also sometimes 
suffer. 



CHAPTER VI. 

FRONTIER TYPES. 

THE old race of Rocky Mountain hunters 
and trappers, of reckless, dauntless Indian 
fighters, is now fast dying out. Yet here 
and there these restless wanderers of the un- 
trodden wilderness still linger, in wooded fast- 
nesses so inaccessible that the miners have not 
yet explored them, in mountain valleys so far 
off that no ranchman has yet driven his herds 
thither. To this day many of them wear the 
fringed ttinic or hunting-shirt, made of buckskin 
or homespim, and belted in at the waist, — the 
most picturesque and distinctively national dress 
ever worn in America. It was the dress in which 
Daniel Boon was clad when he first passed 
through the trackless forests of the AUeghanies 
and penetrated into the heart of Kentucky, to 
enjoy such hunting as no man of his race had 
ever had before; it was the dress worn by grim 
old Davy Crockett when he fell at the Alamo. 
The wild soldiery of the backwoods wore it when 
they marched to victory over Ferguson and 
Pakenham, at King's Mountain and New Orleans ; 
when they conquered the French towns of the 
Illinois; and when they won at the cost of Red 

122 



Frontier Types 123 

Eagle's warriors the bloody triumph of the 
Horseshoe Bend. 

These old-time hunters have been the fore- 
runners of the white advance throughout all our 
Western land. Soon after the beginning of the 
present century they boldly struck out beyond 
the Mississippi, steered their way across the flat 
and endless seas of grass, or pushed up the 
valleys of the great lonely rivers, crossed the 
passes that wound among the towering peaks of 
the Rockies, toiled over the melancholy wastes of 
sage brush and alkali, and at last, breaking 
through the gloomy woodland that belts the 
coast, they looked out on the heaving waves of 
the greatest of all the oceans. They lived for 
months, often for years, among the Indians, now 
as friends, now as foes, warring, hunting, and 
marrying with them; they acted as guides for 
exploring parties, as scouts for the soldiers who 
from time to time were sent against the different 
hostile tribes. At long intervals they came into 
some frontier settlement or some fur compan3^'s 
fort, posted in the heart of the wilderness, to 
dispose of their bales of furs, or to replenish their 
stock of ammunition and purchase a scanty 
supply of coarse food and clothing. 

From that day to this they have not changed 
their way of life. But there are not many of 
them left now. The basin of the Upper Missouri 



124 Ranch Life 

was their last stronghold, being the last great 
hunting-grotmd of the Indians, with whom the 
white trappers were always fighting and bicker- 
ing, but who nevertheless by their presence pro- 
tected the game that gave the trappers their 
livelihood. My cattle were among the very first 
to come into the land, at a time when the buffalo 
and beaver still abounded, and then the old 
hunters were common. Alany a time I have 
hunted with them, spent the night in their smoky 
cabins, or had them as guests at my ranch. But 
in a couple of years after the inrush of the cattle- 
men the last herds of the buffalo were destroyed, 
and the beaver were trapped out of all the plains' 
streams. Then the hunters vanished likewise, 
save that here and there one or two still remain 
in some nook or out-of-the-way comer. The 
others wandered off restlessly over the land, — 
some to join their brethren in the Coeur d'Alene 
or the northern Rockies, others to the coast ranges 
or to far-away Alaska. Moreover, their ranks 
were soon thinned by death, and the places of 
the dead were no longer taken by new recruits. 
They led hard lives, and the amending strain of 
their toilsome and dangerous existence shattered 
even such iron frames as theirs. They were killed 
in drunken brawls, or in nameless fights with 
roving Indians ; they died by one of the thousand 
accidents incident to the business of their lives, — 



Frontier Types 125 

by flood or quicksand, by cold or starvation, by 
the stumble of a horse or a footslip on the edge 
of a cliff; they perished by diseases brought on 
by terrible privation, and aggravated by the 
savage orgies with which it was varied. 

Yet there was not only much that was attrac- 
tive in their wild, free, reckless lives, but there 
was also very much good about the men them- 
selves. They were — and such of them as are left 
still are — frank, bold, and self-reliant to a degree. 
They fear neither man, brute, nor element. They 
are generous and hospitable; they stand loyally 
by their friends, and pursue their enemies with 
bitter and vindictive hatred. For the rest, they 
differ among themselves in their good and bad 
points even more markedly than do men in 
civilized life, for out on the border virtue and 
wickedness alike take on very pronounced colors. 
A man who in civilization would be merely a 
backbiter becomes a murderer on the frontier; 
and, on the other hand, he w^ho in the city would 
do nothing more than bid you a cheery good- 
morning, shares his last bit of sun-jerked venison 
with you when threatened by starvation in the 
"^Tldemess. One hunter may be a dark-browed, 
evil-eyed ruffian, ready to kill cattle or run off 
horses without hesitation, who if game fails will 
at once, in Western phrase, "take to the road," — 
that is, become a highwayman. The next is 



126 Ranch Life 

perhaps a quiet, kindly, simple-hearted man, law- 
abiding, modestly unconscious of the worth of 
his own fearless courage and iron endurance, 
always faithful to his friends, and full of chivalric 
and tender loyalty to women. 

The hunter is the arch-type of freedom. His 
well-being rests in no man's hands save his own. 
He chops down and hews out the logs for his 
hut, or perhaps makes merely a rude dug-out in 
the side of a hill, with a skin roof, and skin flaps 
for the door. He buys a little flour and salt, and 
in times of plenty also sugar and tea; but not 
much, for it must all be carried hundreds of miles 
on the backs of his shaggy pack-ponies. In one 
comer of the hut, a bunk covered with deer-skins 
forms his bed ; a kettle and a frying-pan may be 
all his cooking utensils. When he can get no 
fresh meat he falls back on his stock of jerked 
venison, dried in long strips over the fire or in 
the stin. 

Most of the trappers are Americans, but they 
also include some Frenchmen and half-breeds. 
Both of the last, if on the plains, occasionally 
make use of queer wooden carts, very rude in 
shape, with stout wheels that make a most doleful 
squeaking. In old times they all had Indian 
wives ; but nowadays those who live among and 
intermarry with the Indians are looked down 
upon by the other frontiersmen, who contemptu- 



Frontier Types 127 

ously term them "squaw men." All of them 
depend upon their rifles only for food and for 
self-defense, and make their living by trapping, 
peltries being very valuable and yet not bulky. 
They are good game shots, especially the pure 
Americans; although, of course, they are very 
boastful, and generally stretch the truth tre- 
mendously in telling about their own marks- 
manship. Still they oftendo very remarkable 
shooting, both for speed and accuracy. One of 
their feats, that I never could learn to copy, is 
to make excellent shooting after nightfall. Of 
course all this applies only to the regular hunters ; 
not to the numerous pretenders who hang around 
the outskirts of the towns to try to persuade 
unwary strangers to take them for guides. 

On one of my trips to the mountains I hap- 
pened to come across several old-style hunters at 
the same time. Two were on their way out of 
the woods, after having been all winter and 
spring without seeing a white face. They had 
been lucky, and their battered pack-saddles 
carried bales of valuable furs — fisher, sable, otter, 
mink, beaver. The two men, though fast friends 
and allies for many years, contrasted oddly. One 
was a short, square-built, good-humored Kanuck, 
always laughing and talking, who interlarded his 
conversation with a singularly original mixture 
of the most villainous French and English 



128 Ranch Life 

profanity. His partner was an American, gray- 
eyed, tall and straight as a young pine, with a 
saturnine, rather haughty face, and proud bearing. 
He spoke very little, and then in low tones, never 
using an oath; but he showed now and then a 
most imexpected sense of dry humor. Both were 
images of bronzed and rugged strength. Neither 
had the slightest touch of the bully in his nature ; 
they treated others with the respect that they 
also exacted for themselves. They bore an excel- 
lent reputation as being not only highly skilled 
in woodcraft and the use of the rifle, but also men 
of tried courage and strict integrity, whose word 
could be always implicitly trusted. 

I had with me at the time a hunter who, though 
their equal as marksman or woodsman, was their 
exact opposite morally. He was a pleasant com- 
panion and useful assistant, being very hard- 
working, and possessing a temper that never 
was ruffled by anything. He was also a good- 
looking fellow, with honest brown eyes; but he 
no more knew the difference between right and 
wrong than Adam did before the fall. Had he 
been at all conscious of his wickedness, or had he 
possessed the least sense of shame, he would 
have been imbearable as a companion ; but he 
was so perfectly pleasant and easy, so good- 
humoredly tolerant of virtue in others, and he so 
wholly lacked even a glimmering suspicion that 



Frontier Types 129 

murder, theft, and adultery were matters of 
anything more than individual taste, that I 
actually grew to be rather fond of him. He never 
related any of his past deeds of wickedness as 
matters either for boastfulness or for regret ; they 
were simply repeated incidentally in the course of 
conversation. Thus once, in speaking of the 
profits of his different enterprises, he casually 
mentioned making a good deal of money as a 
Government scout in the Southwest by buying 
cartridges from some negro troops at a cent apiece 
and selling them to the hostile Apaches for a 
dollar each. His conduct was not due to sym- 
pathy with the Indians, for it appeared that later 
on he had taken part in massacring some of these 
same Apaches when they were prisoners. He 
brushed aside as irrelevant one or two questions 
which I put to him : matters of sentiment were 
not to be mixed up with a purely mercantile 
speculation. Another time we were talking of 
the curious angles bullets sometimes fly off at 
when they ricochet. To illustrate the matter he 
related an experience which I shall try to give in 
his own words. "One time, when I was keeping 
a saloon down in New j\Iexico, there was a man 
owed me a grudge. Well, he took sick of the 
small-pox, and the doctor told him he'd sure die, 
and he said if that was so he reckoned he'd 
kill me first. So he come a -riding in with his 

9 



I30 Ranch Life 

gun [in the West a revolver is generally called a 
gun] and begun shooting ; but I hit him first, and 
away he rode. I started to get on my horse to 
follow him ; but there was a little Irishman there 
who said he'd never killed a man, and he begged 
hard for me to give him my gun and let him go 
after the other man and finish him. So I let him 
go; and when he caught up, blamed if the little 
cuss didn't get so nervous that he fired off into 
the groimd, and the darned bullet struck a 
crowbar, and glanced up, and hit the other man 
square in the head and killed him! Now, that 
was a fimny shot, wasn't it?" 

The fourth member of our party round the 
camp-fire that night was a powerfully built 
trapper, partly French by blood, who wore a 
gayly colored capote, or blanket-coat, a greasy 
fur cap, and moccasins. He had grizzled hair, 
and a certain uneasy, half-furtive look about the 
eyes. Once or twice he showed a curious reluc- 
tance about allowing a man to approach him 
suddenly from behind. Altogether his actions 
were so odd that I felt some curiosity to learn 
his history. It turned out that he had been 
through a rather imcanny experience the winter 
before. He and another man had gone into a 
remote basin, or enclosed valley, in the heart of 
the mountains, where game was very plentiful; 
indeed, it was so abimdant that they decided to 



Frontier Types 131 

pass the winter there. Accordingly they put up 
a log-cabin, working hard, and merely killing 
enough meat for their immediate use. Just as it 
was finished winter set in with tremendous snow- 
storms. Going out to hunt, in the first lull, they 
found, to their consternation, that every head of 
game had left the valley. Not an animal was to 
be found therein; they had abandoned it for 
their winter haunts. The outlook for the two 
adventurers was appalling. They were afraid of 
trying to break out through the deep snow-drifts, 
and starvation stared them in the face if they 
stayed. The man I met had his dog with him. 
They put themselves on very short commons, so 
as to use up their flour as slowly as possible, and 
hunted unweariedly, but saw nothing. Soon a 
violent quarrel broke out between them. The 
other man, a fierce, sullen fellow, insisted that 
the dog should be killed, but the owner was 
exceedingly attached to it, and refused. For a 
couple of weeks they spoke no word to each other, 
though cooped in the little narrow pen of logs. 
Then one night the owner of the dog was awakened 
by the animal cr\'ing out; the other man had 
tried to kill it with his knife, but failed. The 
provisions were now almost exhausted, and the 
two men were glaring at each other with the rage 
of maddened, ravening htmger. Neither dared to 
sleep, for fear that the other would kill him. 



132 Ranch Life 

Then the one who owned the dog at last spoke, 
and proposed that, to give each a chance for his 
Hfe, they should separate. He would take half 
of the handful of flour that was left and start off 
to try to get home ; the other should stay where 
he was ; and if he tried to follow the first, he was 
warned that he would be shot without mercy, 
A like fate was to be the portion of the wanderer 
if driven to return to the hut. The arrangement 
was agreed to and the two men separated, neither 
daring to turn his back while they were within 
rifle-shot of each other. For two days the one 
who went off toiled on with weary weakness 
through the snow-drifts. Late on the second 
afternoon, as he looked back from a high ridge, 
he saw in the far distance a black speck against 
the snow, coming along on his trail. His com- 
panion was dogging his footsteps. Immediately 
he followed his own trail back a little and lay in 
ambush. At dusk his companion came stealthily 
up, rifle in hand, peering cautiously ahead, his 
drawn face showing the starved, eager ferocity of 
a wild beast, and the man he was hunting shot 
him dowTi exactly as if he had been one. Leaving 
the body where it fell, the wanderer continued his 
journey, the dog staggering painfully behind him. 
The next evening he baked his last cake and 
divided it with the dog. In the morning, with 
his belt drawn still tighter round his skeleton 



Frontier Types 133 

body, he once more set out, with apparently only 
a few hours of dull misery between him and death. 
At noon he crossed the track of a huge timber- 
wolf ; instantly the dog gave tongue, and, rallying 
its strength, ran along the trail. The man 
struggled after. At last his strength gave out 
and he sat down to die; but while sitting still, 
slowly stiffening with the cold, he heard the dog 
baying in the woods. Shaking off his mortal 
numbness, he crawled toward the soimd, and 
foimd the wolf over the body of a deer that he 
had just killed, and keeping the dog from it. At 
the approach of the new assailant the wolf sul- 
lenly drew off, and man and dog tore the raw 
deer-flesh with hideous eagerness. It made them 
very sick for the next twenty-four hours; but, 
lying by the carcass for two or three days, they 
recovered strength. A week afterward the trapper 
reached a miner's cabin in safety. There he told 
his tale, and the imknown man who alone might 
possibly have contradicted it lay dead in the 
depths of the wolf-haimted forest. 

The cowboys, who have supplanted these old 
htinters and trappers as the typical men of the 
plains, themselves lead lives that are almost as 
full of hardship and adventure. The unbearable 
cold of winter sometimes makes the small out- 
lying camps fairly uninhabitable if fuel runs 
short; and if the line riders are caught in a 



134 Ranch Life 

blizzard while making their way to the home 
ranch, they are lucky if they get off with nothing 
worse than frozen feet and faces. 

They are, in the main, hard-w^orking, faithful 
fellows, but of course are frequently obliged to 
get into scrapes through no fault of their own. 
Once, while out on a wagon trip, I got caught 
while camped by a spring on the prairie, through 
my horses all straying. A few miles off was the 
camp of two cowboys, who were riding the line 
for a great Southern cow-outfit. I did not even 
know their names, but happening to pass by 
them I told of my loss, and the day after they 
turned up with the missing horses, which they 
had been hunting for twenty-four hours. All I 
could do in return was to give them some reading 
matter— something for which the men in these 
lonely camps are always grateful. Afterward I 
spent a day or two with my new friends, and we 
became quite intimate. They were Texans. 
Both were quiet, clean-cut, pleasant-spoken young 
fellows, who did not even swear, except under 
great provocation, — and there can be no greater 
provocation than is given by a "mean" horse or 
a refractory steer. Yet, to my surprise, I found 
that they were, in a certain sense, fugitives from 
justice. They were complaining of the extreme 
severity of the winter weather, and mentioned 
their longing to go back to the South. The 



Frontier Types 135 

reason they could not was that the summer before 
they had taken part in a small civil war in one of 
the wilder counties of New Mexico. It had origi- 
nated in a quarrel between two great ranches over 
their respective water rights and range rights, — 
a quarrel of a kind rife among pastoral peoples 
since the days when the herdsmen of Lot and 
Abraham strove together for the grazing lands 
round the mouth of the Jordan, There were col- 
lisions between bands of armed cowboys, the 
cattle were harried from the springs, outlying 
camps were burned dowTi, and the sons of the 
rival owners fought each other to the death with 
bowie-knife and revolver when they met at the 
drinking-booths of the squalid towns. Soon the 
smoldering jealousy which is ever existent between 
the Americans and Mexicans of the frontier was 
aroused, and when the original cause of quarrel 
was adjusted, a fierce race struggle took its place. 
It was soon quelled by the arrival of a strong 
sheriff's posse and the threat of interference by 
the regular troops, but not until after a couple of 
affrays, each attended with bloodshed. In one of 
these the American cowboys of a certain range, 
after a brisk fight, drove out the Mexican vaqueros 
from among them. In the other, to avenge the 
murder of one of their number, the cowboys 
gathered from the country roimd about and fairly 
stormed the "Greaser" (that is, Mexican) village 



136 Ranch Life 

where the murder had been committed, killing 
four of the inhabitants. My two friends had 
borne a part in this last affair. They were careful 
to give a rather cloudy account of the details, 
but I gathered that one of them was "wanted" 
as a participant, and the other as a witness. 

However, they were both good fellows, and 
probably their conduct was justifiable, at least 
according to the rather fitful lights of the border. 
Sitting up late with them, around the sputtering 
fire, they became quite confidential. At first our 
conversation touched only the usual monotonous 
roimd of subjects worn threadbare in every cow- 
camp. A bunch of steers had been seen traveling 
over the scoria buttes to the head of Elk Creek; 
they were mostly Texan doughgies (a name I have 
never seen written ; it applies to young immigrant 
cattle), but there were some of the Hash-Knife 
four-year-olds among them. A stray horse with 
a blurred brand on the left hip had just joined the 
bunch of saddle-ponies. The red F. V, cow, one 
of whose legs had been badly bitten by a wolf, 
had got mired down in an alkali spring, and when 
hauled out had charged upon her rescuer so 
viciously that he barely escaped. The old mule, 
Sawback, was getting over the effects of the rat- 
tlesnake bite. The river was going down, but the 
fords were still bad, and the quicksand at the Cus- 
ter Trail crossing had worked along so that wagons 



Frontier Types 137 

had to be taken over opposite the blasted cotton- 
wood. One of the men had seen a Three-Seven-B 
rider who had just left the Green River round-up, 
and who brought news that they had found some 
cattle on the reservation, and were now holding 
about twelve himdred head on the big brushy 
bottom below Rainy Butte. Bronco Jim, our 
local flash rider, had tried to ride the big, bald- 
faced sorrel belonging to the Oregon horse-outfit, 
and had been bucked off and his face smashed in. 
This piece of information of course drew forth 
much condemnation of the unfortimate Jim's 
equestrian skill. It was at once agreed that he 
" wasn't the sure-enough bronco-buster he thought 
himself," and he was compared very imfavorably 
to various heroes of the quirt and spurs who lived 
in Texas and Colorado ; for the best rider, like the 
best hiinter, is invariably either dead or else a resi- 
dent of some other district. 

These topics having been exhausted, we dis- 
cussed the rumor that the vigilantes had given 
notice to quit to two men who had just built a 
shack at the head of the Little Dry, and whose 
horses included a suspiciously large number of 
different brands, most of them blurred. Then 
our conversation became more personal, and they 
asked if I would take some letters to post for them. 
Of course I said yes, and two letters — evidently 
the product of severe manual labor — were 



138 Ranch Life 

produced. Each was directed to a girl ; and my 
companions, now very friendly, told me that they 
both had sweethearts, and for the next hour I 
listened to a full accoimt of their charms and 
virtues. 

But it is not often that plainsmen talk so freely. 
They are rather reserved, especially to strangers ; 
and are certain to look with dislike on any man 
who, when they first meet him, talks a great deal. 
It is always a good plan, if visiting a strange camp 
or ranch, to be as silent as possible. 

Another time, at a ranch not far from my own, 
I found among the cowboys gathered for the 
round-up two Bible-reading Methodists. They 
were as strait-laced as any of their kind, but did 
not obtrude their opinions on any one else, and 
were first-class workers, so that they had no 
trouble with the other men. Associated with 
them were two or three blear-eyed, slit-mouthed 
ruffians, who were as loose of tongue as of life. 

Generally some form of stable government is 
provided for the coimties as soon as their popula- 
tion has become at all fixed, the frontiersmen 
showing their national aptitude for organization. 
Then lawlessness is put down pretty effectively. 
For example, as soon as we organized the govern- 
ment of Medora — an excessively unattractive little 
hamlet, the county seat of our huge, scantily 
settled coimty — we elected some good officers, 



Frontier Types 139 

built a log jail, prohibited all shooting in the 
streets, and enforced the prohibition, etc., etc. 

Up to that time there had been a good deal of 
lawlessness of one kind or another, only checked 
by an occasional piece of individual retribution 
or by a sporadic outburst of vigilance committee 
work. In such a society the desperadoes of every 
grade flourish. l^Iany are merely ordinary rogues 
and swindlers, who rob and cheat on occasion, but 
are dangerous only when led by some villain of 
real intellectual power. The gambler, with hawk 
eyes and lissome fingers, is scarcely classed as a 
criminal ; indeed, he may be a very public-spirited 
citizen. But as his trade is so often plied in 
saloons, and as even if, as sometimes happens, 
he does not cheat, many of his opponents are 
certain to attempt to do so, he is of necessity 
obliged to be skilful and ready with his weapon, 
and gambling rows are very common. Cowboys 
lose much of their money to gamblers ; it is with 
them hard come and light go, for they exchange 
the wages of six months' grinding toil and lonely 
peril for three days' whooping carousal, spending 
their money on poisonous whisky or losing it over 
greasy cards in the vile dance-houses. As already 
explained, they are in the main good men; and 
the disturbance they cause in a towTi is done from 
sheer rough lightheartedness. They shoot off 
boot-heels or tall hats occasionally, or make some 



I40 Ranch Life 

obnoxious butt "dance" by shooting round his 
feet; but they rarely meddle in this way with 
men who have not themselves played the fool. 
A fight in the streets is almost always a duel be- 
tween two men who bear each other malice; it 
is only in a general mel6e in a saloon that out- 
siders often get hurt, and then it is their own 
fault, for they have no business to be there. One 
evening at Medora a cowboy spurred his horse 
up the steps of a rickety "hotel" piazza into the 
bar-room, where he began firing at the clock, the 
decanters, etc., the bartender meanwhile taking 
one shot at him, which missed. When he had 
emptied his revolver he threw down a roll of bank- 
notes on the counter, to pay for the damage he 
had done, and galloped his horse out through the 
door, disappearing in the darkness with loud yells 
to a rattling accompaniment of pistol shots inter- 
changed between himself and some passer-by who 
apparently began firing out of pure desire to enter 
into the spirit of the occasion, — for it was the 
night of the Fourth of July, and all the country 
round about had come into town for a spree. 

All this is mere horse-play; it is the cowboy's 
method of "painting the town red," as an inter- 
lude in his harsh, monotonous life. Of course 
there are plenty of hard characters among cow- 
boys, but no more than among lumbermen and 
the like; only the cowboys are so ready with 



Frontier Types 141 

their weapons that a bully in one of their camps 
is apt to be a murderer instead of merely a bruiser. 
Often, moreover, on a long trail, or in a far-off 
camp, where the men are for many months alone, 
feuds spring up that are in the end sure to be 
slaked in blood. As a rule, however, cowboys 
who become desperadoes soon perforce drop their 
original business, and are no longer employed on 
ranches, imless in counties or territories where 
there is very little heed paid to the law, and 
where, in consequence a cattle-owner needs a 
certain number of hired bravos. Until within 
two or three years this was the case in parts of 
Arizona and New Mexico, where land claims were 
"jumped" and cattle stolen all the while, one 
effect being to insure high wages to every indi- 
vidual who combined murderous proclivities with 
skill in the use of the six-shooter. 

Even in much more quiet regions different out- 
fits vary greatly as regards the character of their 
employees : I know one or two where the men are 
good ropers and riders, but a gambling, brawling, 
hard-drinking set, always shooting each other or 
strangers. Generally, in such a case, the boss is 
himself as objectionable as his men ; he is one of 
those who have risen by unblushing rascality, and 
is always sharply watched by his neighbors, 
because he is sure to try to shift calves on to his 
own cows, to brand any blurred animal with his 



142 Ranch Life 

own mark, and perhaps to attempt the alteration 
of perfectly plain brands. The last operation, 
however, has become very risky since the organi- 
zation of the cattle coiintry, and the appointment 
of trained brand-readers as inspectors. These 
inspectors examine the hide of every animal 
slain, sold, or driven off, and it is wonderful to 
see how quickly one of them will detect any signs 
of a brand having been tampered with. Now 
there is, in consequence, very little of this kind 
of dishonesty ; whereas formerly herds were occa- 
sionally stolen almost bodily. 

Claim-jumpers are, as a rule, merely black- 
mailers. Sometimes they will by threats drive 
an ignorant foreigner from his claim, but never 
an old frontiersman. They delight to squat down 
beside ranchmen who are themselves trying to 
keep land to which they are not entitled, and who 
therefore know that their only hope is to bribe or 
to bully the intruder. 

Cattle-thieves, for the reason given above, are 
not common, although there are plenty of vicious, 
shiftless men who will kill a cow or a steer for the 
meat in winter, if they get a chance. 

Horse-thieves, however, are always numerous 
and formidable on the frontier; though in our 
own coimtry they have been summarily thinned 
out of late years. It is the fashion to laugh at 
the severity with which horse-stealing is pimished 



Frontier Types 143 

on the border, but the reasons are evident. Horses 
are the most valuable property of the frontiers- 
man, whether cowboy, hunter, or settler, and are 
often absolutely essential to his well-being, and 
even to his life. They are always marketable, 
and they are very easily stolen, for they carry 
themselves off, instead of having to be carried. 
Horse-stealing is thus a most tempting business, 
especially to the more reckless ruffians, and it is 
always followed by armed men ; and they can 
only be kept in check by ruthless severity. Fre- 
quently they band together with the road agents 
(highwaymen) and other desperadoes into secret 
organizations, which control and terrorize a dis- 
trict until overthrown by force. After the Civil 
"War a great many guerrillas, notably from Arkan- 
sas and Missotiri, went out to the plains, often 
drifting northward. They took naturally to horse- 
stealing and kindred pursuits. Since I have been 
in the northern cattle country I have known of 
half a dozen former members of Quantrell's gang 
being hung or shot. 

The professional man-killers, or "bad men," 
may be horse-thieves or highwaymen, but more 
often are neither one nor the other. Some of 
them, like some of the Texan cowboys, become 
very expert in the use of the revolver, their in- 
variable standby; but in the open a cool man 
with a rifle is always an overmatch for one of 



144 Ranch Life 

them, unless at very close quarters, on account 
of the superiority of his weapon. Some of the 
"bad men" are quiet, good fellows, who have 
been driven into their career by accident. One 
of them has perhaps at some time killed a man 
in self-defense; he acquires some reputation, and 
the neighboring bullies get to look on him as a 
rival whom it would be an honor to slay ; so that 
from that time on he must be ever on the watch, 
must learn to draw quick and shoot straight, — 
the former being even more important than the 
latter, — and probably has to take life after life 
in order to save his own. 

Some of these men are brave only because of 
their confidence in their own skill and strength; 
once convince them that they are overmatched 
and they turn into abject cowards. Others have 
nerves of steel and will face any odds, or certain 
death itself, without flinching a hand's breadth. 
I was once staying in a town where a desperately 
plucky fight took place. A noted desperado, an 
Arkansas man, had become involved in a quarrel 
with two others of the same ilk, both Irishmen and 
partners. For several days all three lurked about 
the saloon-infested streets of the roaring little 
board -and-canvas "city," each trying to get "the 
drop," — that is, the first shot, — the other inhab- 
itants looking forward to the fight with pleased 
curiosity, no one dreaming of interfering. At last 



Frontier Types 145 

one of the partners got a chance at his opponent 
as the latter was walking into a gambling hell, and 
broke his back near the hips; yet the crippled, 
mortally wounded man twisted aroiind as he fell 
and shot his slayer dead. Then, knowing that 
he had but a few moments to live, and expecting 
that his other foe would run up on hearing the 
shooting, he dragged himself by his arms out into 
the street; immediately afterward, as he antici- 
pated, the second partner appeared, and was killed 
on the spot. The victor did not live twenty min- 
utes. As in most of these encoimters, all of the 
men who were killed deserved their fate. In my 
own not very extensive experience I can recall 
but one man killed in these fights whose death 
was regretted, and he was slain by a European. 
Generally every one is heartily glad to hear of the 
death of either of the contestants, and the only 
regret is that the other survives. 

One curious shooting scrape that took place in 
^ledora was worthy of being chronicled by Bret 
Harte. It occurred in the summer of 1884, I 
believe, but it may have been the year following. 
I did not see the actual occurrence, but I saw 
both men immediately afterwards; and I heard 
the shooting, which took place in a saloon on the 
bank, while I was swimming my horse across the 
river, holding my rifle up so as not to wet it. I 
will not give their full names, as I am not certain 



10 



146 Ranch Life 

what has become of them ; though I was told that 
one had since been either put in jail or himg, I 
forget which. One of them was a saloon-keeper, 
familiarly called Welshy. The other man, Hay, 
had been bickering with him for some time. One 
day Hay, who had been defeated in a wrestling 
match by one of my own boys, and was out of 
temper, entered the other's saloon, and became 
very abusive. The quarrel grew more and more 
violent, and suddenly Welshy whipped out his 
revolver and blazed away at Hay. The latter 
staggered slightly, shook himself, stretched out 
his hand, and gave hack to his would-be slayer the 
ball, saying, "Here, man, here's the bullet." It 
had glanced along his breast-bone, gone into the 
body, and come out at the point of the shoulder, 
when, being spent, it dropped down the sleeve 
into his hand. Next day the local paper, which 
rejoiced in the title of "The Bad Lands Cowboy," 
chronicled the event in the usual vague way as 
an "unfortunate occurrence" between "two of 
our most esteemed fellow-citizens." The editor 
was a good fellow, a college graduate, and a first- 
class baseball player, who always stood stoutly 
up against any corrupt dealing ; but, like all other 
editors in small Western towns, he was intimate 
with both combatants in almost every fight. 

The winter after this occurrence I was away, 
and on my return began asking my foreman — a 



A Row in Cattle Town. 



146 






be sl^ 



Frontier Types 147 

particular crony of mine — about the fates of my 
various friends. Among others I inquired after 
a traveHng preacher who had come to our neigh- 
borhood; a good man, but irascible. After a 
moment's pause a gleam of remembrance came 
into my informant's eye: "Oh, the parson! 
Well — he beat a man over the head with an ax, 
and they put him in jail!" It certainly seemed 
a rather summary method of repressing a refrac- 
tory parishioner. Another acquaintance had 
shared a like doom. "He started to go out of 
the coimtr>% but they ketched him at Bismarck 
and put him in jail" — apparently on general 
principles, for I did not hear of his having com- 
mitted any specific crime. My foreman some- 
times developed his own theories of propriety. I 
remember his objecting strenuously to a proposal 
to lynch a certain French-Canadian who had lived 
in his own cabin, back from the river, ever since 
the w^hites came into the land, but who was sus- 
pected of being a horse-thief. His chief point 
against the proposal was, not that the man was 
innocent, but that "it didn't seem anyways right 
to hang a man who had been so long in the coun- 
try." 

Sometimes we had a comic row. There was 
one huge man from Missouri called "The Pike," 
who had been the keeper of a wood-yard for 
steamboats on the Upper Missouri. Like most 



148 Ranch Life 

of his class he was a hard case, and, though pleas- 
ant enough when sober, always insisted on fighting 
when drunk. One day, when on a spree, he 
announced his intention of thrashing the entire 
population of Medora seriatim, and began to 
make his promise good with great vigor and praise- 
worthy impartiality. He was victorious over the 
first two or three eminent citizens whom he en- 
coimtered, and then tackled a gentleman known 
as "Cold Turkey Bill." Under ordinary circiun- 
stances. Cold Turkey, though an able-bodied man, 
was no match for The Pike; but the latter was 
still rather dnmk, and moreover was wearied by 
his previous combats. So Cold Turkey got him 
down, lay on him, choked him by the throat with 
one hand, and began pounding his face with a 
triangular rock held in the other. To the on- 
lookers the fate of the battle seemed decided ; but 
Cold Turkey better appreciated the endurance of 
his adversary, and it soon appeared that he sym- 
pathized with the traditional hunter who, having 
caught a wildcat, earnestly besought a comrade 
to help him let it go. While still pounding vigor- 
ously he raised an agonized wail: "Help me off, 
fellows, for the Lord's sake; he's tiring me out!" 
There was no resisting so plaintive an appeal, and 
the bystanders at once abandoned their attitude of 
neutrality for one of armed intervention. 

I have always been treated with the utmost 



Frontier Types 149 

courtesy by all cowboys, whether on the round-up 
or in camp ; and the few real desperadoes I have 
seen were also perfectly polite. Indeed, I never 
was shot at maliciously but once. This was on 
an occasion when I had to pass the night in a 
little frontier hotel where the bar-room occupied 
the whole lower floor, and was in consequence the 
place where every one, drunk or sober, had to sit. 
My assailant was neither a cowboy nor a bo7ta fide 
"bad man," but a broad-hatted ruffian of cheap 
and commonplace type, who had for the moment 
terrorized the other men in the bar-room, these 
being mostly sheep-herders and small grangers. 
The fact that I wore glasses, together with my 
evident desire to avoid a fight, apparently gave 
him the impression — a mistaken one — that I 
would not resent an injury. 

The first deadly affray that took place m our 
town, after the cattlemen came in and regular 
settlement began, was between a Scotchman and 
a Minnesota man, the latter being one of the small 
stockmen. Both had "shooting" records, and 
each was a man with a varied past. The Scotch- 
man, a noted bully, was the more daring of the 
two, but he was much too hot-headed and over- 
bearing to be a match for his gray-eyed, hard- 
featured foe. After a furious quarrel and threats 
of violence, the Scotchman mounted his horse, 
and, rifle in hand, rode to the door of the mud- 



ISO Ranch Life 

ranch, perched on the brink of the river-bluff, 
where the American Hved, and was instantly shot 
down by the latter from behind a comer of the 
building. 

Later on I once opened a cowboy ball with the 
wife of the victor in this contest, the husband 
himself dancing opposite. It was the lanciers, 
and he knew all the steps far better than I did. 
He could have danced a minuet very well with a 
little practice. The scene reminded one of the 
ball where Bret Harte's heroine "danced down 
the middle with the man who shot Sandy Magee." 

But though there were plenty of men present 
each of whom had shot his luckless Sandy Magee, 
yet there was no Lily of Poverty Flat. There 
is an old and true border saying that ' ' the frontier 
is hard on women and cattle." There are some 
striking exceptions; but, as a rule, the grinding 
toil and hardship of a life passed in the wilderness, 
or on its outskirts, drive the beauty and bloom 
from a woman's face long before her youth has 
left her. By the time she is a mother she is 
sinewy and angular, with thin, compressed lips 
and furrowed, sallow brow. But she has a him- 
dred qualities that atone for the grace she lacks. 
She is a good mother and a hardworking house- 
wife, always putting things to rights, washing and 
cooking for her stalwart spouse and offspring. 
She is faithful to her husband, and, like the true 



Frontier Types 151 

American that she is, exacts faithfulness in return. 
Peril cannot daunt her, nor hardship and poverty 
appall her. Whether on the mountains in a log 
hut chinked with moss, in a sod or adobe hovel 
on the desolate prairie, or in a mere temporary- 
camp, where the white-topped wagons have been 
drawn up in a protection-giving circle near some 
spring, she is equally at home. Clad in a dingy 
gown and a hideous sim-bonnet she goes bravely 
about her work, resolute, silent, uncomplaining. 
The children grow up pretty much as fate dictates. 
Even when very small they seem well able to pro- 
tect themselves. The wife of one of my teamsters , 
who lived in a small outlying camp, used to keep 
the yoimgest and most troublesome members of 
her family out of mischief by the simple expedient 
of picketing them out, each child being tied by the 
leg, with a long leather string, to a stake driven 
into the ground, so that it could neither get at 
another child nor at anything breakable. 

The best buckskin maker I ever met was, if 
not a typical frontierswoman, at least a woman 
who could not have reached her full development 
save on the border. She made first-class himting- 
shirts, leggins, and gauntlets. When I knew her 
she was living alone in her cabin on mid-prairie, 
having dismissed her husband six months previ- 
ously in an exceedingly summary manner. She 
not only possessed redoubtable qualities of head 



152 Ranch Life 

and hand, but also a nice sense of justice, even 
toward Indians, that is not always found on the 
frontier. Once, going there for a buckskin shirt, 
I met at her cabin three Sioux, and from their 
leader, named One Bull, purchased a tobacco- 
pouch, beautifully worked with porcupine quills. 
She had given them some dinner, for which they 
had paid with a deer-hide. Falling into conver- 
sation, she mentioned that just before I came up 
a white man, apparently from Deadwood, had 
passed by, and had tried to steal the Indians' 
horses. The latter had been too quick for him, 
had run him down, and brought him back to the 
cabin. " I told 'em to go right on and hang him, 
and / wouldn't never cheep about it," said my 
informant; "but they let him go, after taking 
his gun. There ain't no sense in stealing from 
Indians any more than from white folks, and I'm 
not going to have it round my ranch, neither. 
There! I'll give 'em back the deer-hide the}'- give 
me for the dinner and things, an3nvay." I told 
her I sincerely wished we could make her sheriff 
and Indian agent. She made the Indians — and 
whites, too, for that matter — behave themselves 
and walk the straightest kind of line, not toler- 
ating the least symptom of rebellion ; but she had 
a strong natural sense of justice. 

The cowboy balls, spoken of above, are always 
great events in the small towns where they take 



Frontier Types 153 

place, being usually given when the round-up 
passes near ; everybody round about comes in for 
them. They are almost always conducted with 
great decorum; no imseemly conduct would be 
tolerated. There is usually some master of the 
ceremonies, chosen with due regard to brawn as 
well as brain. He calls off the figures of the square 
dances, so that even the inexperienced may get 
through them, and incidentally preserves order. 
Sometimes we are allowed to wear our revolvers, 
and sometimes not. The nature of the band, of 
course, depends upon the size of the place. I 
remember one ball that came near being a failure 
because our half-breed fiddler " went and got him- 
self shot," as the indignant master of the cere- 
monies phrased it. 

But all these things are merely incidents in the 
cowboy's life. It is utterly imfair to judge the 
whole class by what a few individuals do in the 
course of two or three days spent in town, instead 
of by the long months of weary, honest toil com- 
mon to all alike. To appreciate properly his fine, 
manly qualities, the wild rough-rider of the plains 
should be seen in his own home. There he passes 
his days, there he does his lifework, there, when 
he meets death, he faces it as he has faced many 
other evils, with quiet, imcomplaining fortitude. 
Brave, hospitable, hardy, and adventurous, he is 
the grim pioneer of our race ; he prepares the way 



154 Ranch Life 

for the civilization from before whose face he must 
himself disappear. Hard and dangerous though 
his existence is, it has yet a wild attraction that 
strongly draws to it his bold, free spirit. He lives 
in the lonely lands where mighty rivers twist in 
long reaches between the barren bluffs ; where the 
prairies stretch out into billowy plains of waving 
grass, girt only by the blue horizon, — plains across 
whose endless breadth he can steer his course for 
days and weeks and see neither man to speak to 
nor hill to break the level; where the glory and 
the burning splendor of the sunsets kindle the 
blue vault of heaven and the level brown earth 
till they merge together in an ocean of flaming fire. 



CHAPTER VII. 

RED AND WHITE ON THE BORDER, 

UP to 1880 the country through which the 
Little Missouri flows remained as wild and 
almost as unkno\ATi as it was when the 
old explorers and fur-traders crossed it in the 
early part of the century. It was the last great 
Indian hunting-ground, across which Grosventres 
and Mandans, Sioux and Cheyennes, and even 
Crows and Rees wandered in chase of game, and 
where they fought one another and plundered 
the small parties of white trappers and hunters 
that occasionally ventured into it. Once or twice 
generals like Sully and Custer had penetrated it 
in the course of the long, tedious, and bloody 
campaigns that finally broke the strength of the 
northern Horse Indians; indeed, the trail made 
by Custer's baggage train is to this day one of 
the well-known landmarks, for the deep ruts worn 
by the wheels of the heavy wagons are in many 
places still as distinctly to be seen as ever. 

In 1883, a regular long-range skirmish took 
place just south of us between some Cheyennes 
and some cowboys, with bloodshed on both sides, 
while about the same time a band of Sioux 
plundered a party of buffalo hunters of every- 

155 



156 Ranch Life 

thing they owned, and some Crows who attempted 
the same feat with another party were driven off 
with the loss of two of their number. Since then 
there have been in our neighborhood no stand-up 
fights or regular raids ; but the Indians have at 
different times proved more or less troublesome, 
burning the grass, and occasionally killing stock 
or carr^dng off horses that have wandered some 
distance away. They have also themselves suffered 
somewhat at the hands of white horse thieves. 
Bands of them, accompanied by their squaws 
and children, often come into the ranch country, 
either to trade or to himt, and are then, of course, 
perfectly meek and peaceable. If they stay any 
time they build themselves quite comfortable 
tepees (wigwams, as they would be styled in the 
East) , and an Indian camp is a rather interesting, 
though very dirty, place to visit. On our ranch 
we get along particularly well with them, as it is 
a rule that they shall be treated as fairly as if 
they were whites: we neither wrong them our- 
selves nor allow others to wrong them. We have 
always, for example, been as keen in putting down 
horse-stealing from Indians as from whites — 
which indicates rather an advanced stage of 
frontier morality, as theft from the "redskins" 
or the "Government" is usually held to be a very 
trivial matter compared with the heinous crime 
of theft from "citizens." 



Red and White on the Border 157 

There is always danger in meeting a band of 
yoiing bucks in lonely, uninhabited country — 
those that have barely reached manhood being 
the most truculent, insolent, and reckless. A man 
meeting such a party runs great risk of losing his 
horse, his rifle, and all else he has. This has hap- 
pened quite frequently during the past few years 
to himters or cowboys who have wandered into 
the debatable territory where our country borders 
on the Indian lands; and in at least one such 
instance, that took place three years ago, the 
unfortunate individual lost his life as well as his 
belongings. But a frontiersman of any experi- 
ence can generally "stand off" a small number 
of such assailants, unless he loses his nerve or is 
taken by surprise. 

My only adventure with Indians was of a very 
mild kind. It was in the course of a solitary trip 
to the north and east of our range, to what was 
then practically unknown country, although now 
containing many herds of cattle. One morning 
I had been traveling along the edge of the prairie, 
and about noon I rode Manitou up a slight rise 
and came out on a plateau that was perhaps half 
a mile broad. When near the middle, four or 
five Indians suddenly came up over the edge, 
directly in front of me. The second they saw me 
they whipped their guns out of their slings, 
started their horses into a run, and came on at 



158 Ranch Life 

full tilt, whooping and brandishing their weapons. 
I instantly reined up and dismounted. The level 
plain where we were was of all places the one on 
w^hich such an onslaught could best be met. In 
any broken coimtry, or where there is much 
cover, a white man is at a great disadvantage if 
pitted against such adepts in the art of hiding as 
Indians ; while, on the other hand, the latter will 
rarely rush in on a foe who, even if overpowered 
in the end, will probably inflict severe loss on his 
assailants. The fury of an Indian charge, and 
the whoops by which it is accompanied, often 
scare horses so as to stampede them; but in 
Manitou I had perfect trust, and the old fellow 
stood as steady as a rock, merely cocking his ears 
and looking round at the noise. I waited until 
the Indians were a hundred yards off, and then 
threw up my rifle and drew a bead on the fore- 
most. The effect was like magic. The whole 
party scattered out as wild pigeons or teal ducks 
sometimes do w^hen shot at, and doubled back on 
their tracks, the men bending over alongside their 
horses. When some distance off they halted and 
gathered together to consult, and after a minute 
one came forward alone, ostentatiously dropping 
his rifle and waving a blanket over his head. 
When he came to within fifty yards I stopped 
him, and he pulled out a piece of paper — all 
Indians, when absent from their reservations, are 



Red and White on the Border 159 

supposed to carry passes — and called out, "How! 
Me good Indian!" I answered, "How," and 
assured liim most sincerely I was very glad he 
was a good Indian, but I w^ould not let him come 
closer; and when his companions began to draw 
near, I covered him with the rifle and made him 
move off, which he did with a sudden lapse into 
the most canonical Anglo-Saxon profanity. I 
then started to lead my horse out to the prairie ; 
and after hovering round a short time they rode 
off, while I followed suit, but in the opposite 
direction. It had all passed too quickly for me 
to have time to get frightened; but during the 
rest of my ride I was exceedingly uneasy, and 
pushed tough, speedy old Manitou along at a 
rapid rate, keeping well out on the level. How- 
ever, I never saw the Indians again. They may 
not have intended any mischief beyond giving me 
a fright ; but I did not dare to let them come to 
close quarters, for they would have probably 
taken my horse and rifle, and not impossibly my 
scalp as well. Toward nightfall I fell in with two 
old trappers who lived near Killdeer Mountains, 
and they informed me that my assailants were 
some yoimg Sioux bucks, at whose hands they 
themselves had just suffered the loss of two horses. 
A few cool, resolute whites, well armed, can 
generally beat back a much larger number of 
Indians if attacked in the open. One of the first 



i6o Ranch Life 

cattle outfits that came to the Powder River 
country, at the very end of the last war with the 
Sioux and Cheyennes, had an experience of this 
sort. There were six or eight whites, including 
the foreman, who was part owner, and they had 
about a thousand head of cattle. These they 
intended to hold just out of the dangerous dis- 
trict until the end of the war, which was evidently 
close at hand. They would thus get first choice 
of the new grazing grounds. But they ventured 
a little too far, and one day while on the trail 
were suddenly charged by fifty or sixty Indians. 
The cattle were scattered in every direction, and 
many of them slain in wantonness, though most 
were subsequently recovered. All the loose horses 
were driven off. But the men themselves in- 
stantly ran together and formed a ring, fighting 
from behind the pack and saddle ponies. One of 
their number was killed, as well as two or three of 
the animals composing their living breastwork; 
but being good riflemen, they drove off their foes. 
The latter did not charge them directly, but 
circled round, each rider concealed on the outside 
of his horse; and though their firing was very 
rapid, it was, naturally, very wild. The whites 
killed a good many ponies, and got one scalp, 
belonging to a young Sioux brave who dashed up 
too close, and whose body in consequence could 
not be carried off by his comrades, as happened 



Red and White on the Border i6i 

to the two or three others who were seen to fall. 
Both the men who related the incident to me had 
been especially struck by the skill and daring 
shown by the Indians in thus carrying off their 
dead and wounded the instant they fell. 

The relations between the white borderers and 
their red-skinned foes and neighbors are rarely 
pleasant. There are incessant quarrels, and each 
side has to complain of bitter wrongs. Many of 
the frontiersmen are brutal, reckless, and over- 
bearing; most of the Indians are treacherous, 
revengeful, and fiendishly cruel. Crime and 
bloodshed are the only possible results when such 
men are brought in contact. Writers usually pay 
heed only to one side of the story ; they recite the 
crimes committed by one party, whether whites 
or Indians, and omit all reference to the equally 
numerous sins of the other. In our dealings with 
the Indians we have erred quite as often through 
sentimentality as through wilful wrong-doing. 
Out of my own short experience I could recite a 
dozen instances of white outrages which, if told 
alone, would seem to justify all the outcry raised 
on behalf of the Indian; and I could also tell of 
as many Indian atrocities which make one almost 
feel that not a single one of the race should be 
left alive. 

The chief trouble arises from the feeling alluded 
to in this last sentence — the tendency on each 
II 



1 62 Ranch Life 

side to hold the race, and not the individual, 
responsible for the deeds of the latter. The 
skirmish between the cowboys and the Cheyennes, 
spoken of above, offers a case in point. It was 
afterward found out that two horse-thieves had 
stolen some ponies from the Cheyennes. The 
latter at once sallied out and attempted to take 
some from a cow camp, and a fight resiilted. In 
exactly the same way I once knew a party of 
buffalo himters, who had been robbed of their 
horses by the Sioux, to retaliate by stealing an 
equal number from some perfectly peaceful Gros- 
ventres. A white or an Indian who would not 
himself commit any outrage will yet make no 
effort to prevent his fellows from organizing 
expeditions against men of the rival race. This is 
natural enough where law is weak, and where, in 
consequence, every man has as much as he can do 
to protect himself without meddling in the quar- 
rels of his neighbors. Thus a white community 
will often refrain from taking active steps against 
men who steal horses only from the Indians, 
although I have known a number of instances 
where the ranchmen have themselves stopped 
such outrages. The Indians behave in the same 
way. There is a peaceful tribe not very far from 
us which harbors two or three red horse-thieves, 
who steal from the whites at every chance. 
Recently, in our country, an expedition was 



Red and White on the Border 163 

raised to go against these horse-thieves, and it 
was only with the utmost difficulty that it was 
stopped : had it actually gone, accompanied as it 
would have been by scoimdrels bent on plunder, 
as well as by wronged men who thought all 
redskins pretty much alike, the inevitable result 
would have been a bloody fight with all the 
Indians, both good and bad. 

Not only do Indians differ individually, but 
they differ as tribes. An upper-class Cherokee is 
nowadays as good as a white. The Nez Perces 
differ from the Apaches as much as a Scotch laird 
does from a Calabrian bandit. A Cheyenne 
warrior is one of the most redoubtable foes in 
the whole world; a "digger" Snake one of the 
most despicable. The Pueblo is as thrifty, indus- 
trious, and peaceful as any European peasant, 
and no Arab of the Soudan is a lazier, wilder 
robber than is the Arapahoe. 

The frontiersmen themselves differ almost as 
widely from one another. But in the event of an 
Indian outbreak all suffer alike, and so all are 
obliged to stand together : when the reprisals for 
a deed of guilt are sure to fall on the innocent, 
the latter have no resource save to ally them- 
selves wnth the guilty. Moreover, even the best 
Indians are very apt to have a good deal of the 
wild beast in them ; when they scent blood they 
with their share of it, no matter from whose vems 



1 64 Ranch Life 

it flows. I once had a German in my employ, 
who, when a yoimg child, had lost all his relations 
by a fate so terrible that it had weighed down his 
whole after-life. His family was living out on 
the extreme border at the time of the great Sioux 
outbreak toward the end of the Civil War. There 
were many Indians around, seemingly on good 
terms with them; and to two of these Indians 
they had been able to be of much service, so that 
they became great friends. When the outbreak 
occurred, the members of this family were among 
the first captured. The two friendly Indians then 
endeavored to save their lives, doing all they 
could to dissuade their comrades from com- 
mitting violence. Finally, after an angry dis- 
cussion, the chief, who was present, suddenly 
ended it by braining the mother. The two 
former friends then, finding their efforts useless, 
forthwith turned round and joined with the 
others, first in violating the wretched daughters, 
and then in putting them to death with tortures 
that cannot even be hinted at. The boy alone 
was allowed to live. If he had been a native- 
bom frontiersman, instead of a peaceful, quiet 
German, he probably would have turned into an 
inveterate Indian-slayer, resolute to kill any of 
the hated race wherever and whenever met — a 
type far from imknown on the border, of which I 
have myself seen at least one example. 



Red and White on the Border 165 

With this incident it is only fair to contrast 
another that I heard related while spending the 
night in a small cow ranch on the Beaver, whither 
I had ridden on one of our many tedious hunts 
after lost horses. Being tired, I got into my 
bimk early, and while lying there listened to the 
conversation of two cowboys — both strangers to 
me — who had also ridden up to the ranch to spend 
the night. They were speaking of Indians, and 
mentioned, certainly without any marked disap- 
probation, a jury that had just acquitted a noted 
horse-thief of the charge of stealing stock from 
some Piegans, though he himself had openly 
admitted its truth. One, an unprepossessing, 
beetle-browed man, suddenly remarked that he 
had once met an Indian who was a pretty good 
fellow, and he proceeded to tell the story. A 
small party of Indians had passed the winter near 
the ranch at which he was employed. The chief 
had two particularly fine horses, which so excited 
his cupidity that one night he drove them off and 
"cached" — that is, hid — them in a safe place. 
The chief looked for them high and low, but 
without success. Soon afterward one of the 
cowboy's own horses strayed. When spring came 
the Indians went away ; but three days afterward 
the chief returned, bringing with him the strayed 
horse, which he had happened to run across. 
"I couldn't stand that," said the narrator, "so I 



i66 Ranch Life 

just told him I reckoned I knew where his own 
lost horses were, and I saddled up my bronch' 
and piloted him to them," 

Here and there on the border there is a certain 
amount of mixture with the Indian blood; much 
more than is commonly supposed. One of the 
most hard-working and prosperous men in our 
neighborhood is a Chippewa half-breed; he is 
married to a white wife, and ranks in every 
respect as a white. Two of our richest cattle- 
men are married to Indian women ; their children 
are being educated in convents. In several of the 
most thriving Northwestern cities men could be 
pointed out, standing high in the community, who 
have a strong dash of Indian blood in their veins. 
Often, however, especially in the lower classes, 
they seem to feel some shame about admitting 
the cross, so that in a couple of generations it is 
forgotten. 

Indians are excellent fighters, though they do 
not shoot well — being in this respect much inferior 
not only to the old himters, but also, nowadays, 
to the regular soldiers, who during the past three 
or four years have improved wonderfully in marks- 
manship. They have a very effective discipline 
of their own, and thus a body of them may 
readily be an overmatch for an equal number of 
frontiersmen if the latter have no leader whom 
they respect. If the cowboys have rifles — for the 



Red and White on the Border 167 

revolver is useless in long-range individual fight- 
ing — they feel no fear of the Indians, so long as 
there are but half a dozen or so on a side; but, 
though infinitely quicker in their movements than 
regular cavalry, yet, owing to their heavy saddles, 
they are not able to make quite so wonderful 
marches as the Indians do, and their unruly spirit 
often renders them ineffective when gathered in 
any niimber without a competent captain. Under 
a man like Forrest they would become the most 
formidable fighting horsemen in the world. 

In the summer of 1886, at the time of the war- 
scare over the "Cutting incident," we began the 
organization of a troop of cavalry in our district, 
notifying the Secretary of War that we were at 
the service of the Government, and being prom- 
ised every assistance by our excellent chief execu- 
tive of the Territory, Governor Pierce. Of course 
the cowboys were all eager for war, they did not 
much care with whom ; they were very patriotic,' 
they were fond of adventure, and, to tell the 
truth, they were by no means averse to the 
prospect of plunder. News from the outside 
world came to us very irregularly, and often in 
distorted form, so that we began to think we 
might get involved in a conflict not only with 

*The day that the Anarchists were hung in Chicago, my 
men joined with the rest of the neighborhood in burning them 
in effigy. 



i68 Ranch Life 

Mexico, but with England also. One evening at 
my ranch the men began talking over the English 
soldiers, so I got down "Napier" and read them 
several extracts from his descriptions of the fight- 
ing in the Spanish peninsula, also recounting as 
well as I could the great deeds of the British 
cavalry from Waterloo to Balaklava, and finishing 
up by describing from memory the fine appear- 
ance, the magnificent equipment, and the superb 
horses of the Household cavalry and of a regiment 
of hussars I had once seen. 

All of this produced much the same effect on 
my listeners that the sight of Marmion's cavalcade 
produced in the minds of the Scotch moss-troopers 
on the eve of Flodden; and at the end, one of 
them, who had been looking into the fire and 
rubbing his hands together, said with regretful 
emphasis, "Oh, how I would like to kill one of 
them!" 



CHAPTER VIII. 

sheriff's work on a ranch. 

IN our own immediate locality we have had 
more difficulty with white desperadoes than 
with the redskins. At times there has been 
a good deal of cattle-killing and horse-stealing, 
and occasionally a murder or two. But as regards 
the last, a man has very little more to fear in the 
West than in the East, in spite of all the lawless 
acts one reads about. Undoubtedly a long-stand- 
ing quarrel sometimes ends in a shooting-match; 
and of course savage affrays occasionally take 
place in the bar-rooms ; in which, be it remarked, 
that, inasmuch as the men are generally dnmk, 
and, furthermore, as the revolver is at best a 
rather inaccurate weapon, outsiders are nearly as 
apt to get hurt as are the participants. But if a 
man minds his ovm business and does not go into 
bar-rooms, gambling saloons, and the like, he need 
have no fear of being molested ; while a revolver 
is a mere foolish encumbrance for any but a trained 
expert, and need never be carried. Against horse- 
thieves, cattle-thieves, claim- jumpers, and the like, 
however, every ranchman has to be on his guard ; 
and armed collisions with these gentry are some- 
times inevitable. The fact of such scoundrels 

169 



lyo Ranch Life 

being able to ply their trade with impunity for 
any length of time can only be understood if the 
absolute wildness of our land is taken into account. 
The country is yet imsurveyed and unmapped; 
the course of the river itself, as put down on the 
various Government and railroad maps, is very 
much a mere piece of guesswork, its bed being in 
many parts — as by my ranch — ten or fifteen miles, 
or more, away from where these maps make it. 
White hunters came into the land by 1880; but 
the actual settlement only began in 1882, when 
the first cattlemen drove in their herds, all of 
Northern stock, the Texans not passing north of 
the country around the head-waters of the river 
imtil the following year, while imtil 1885 the ter- 
ritory through which it ran for the final hundred 
and fifty miles before entering the Big Missouri 
remained as little known as ever. 

Some of us had always been anxious to run 
down the river in a boat during the time of the 
spring floods, as we thought we might get good 
duck and goose shooting, and also kill some beaver, 
while the trip would, in addition, have all the 
charm of an exploring expedition. Twice, so far 
as we knew, the feat had been performed, both 
times by hunters, and in one instance with very 
good luck in shooting and trapping. A third 
attempt, by two men on a raft, made the spring 
preceding that on which we made ours, had been 



Sheriff's Work on a Ranch 171 

less successful ; for, when a score or so of miles 
below our ranch, a bear killed one of the two 
adventurers, and the survivor returned. 

We could only go down during a freshet; for 
the Little Missouri, like most plains' rivers, is 
usually either a dwindling streamlet, a mere slen- 
der thread of sluggish water, or else a boiling, 
muddy torrent, running over a bed of shifting 
quicksand, that neither man nor beast can cross. 
It rises and falls with extraordinary suddenness 
and intensity, an instance of which has just 
occurred as this very page is being written. Last 
evening, when the moon rose, from the ranch 
veranda we could see the river-bed almost dry, 
the stream having shrunk -under the drouth till 
it was little but a string of shallow pools, with 
between them a trickle of water that was not 
ankle deep, and hardly wet the fetlocks of the 
saddle-band when driven across it; yet at day- 
break this morning, without any rain having 
fallen near us, but doubtless in consequence of 
some heavy cloudburst near its head, the swift, 
swollen current was foaming brim high between 
the banks, and even the fords were swimming-deep 
for the horses. 

Accordingly we had planned to run down the 
river some time toward the end of April, taking 
advantage of a rise ; but an accident made us start 
three or four weeks sooner than we had intended. 



172 Ranch Life 

In 1886 the ice went out of the upper river ver>- 
early, during the first part of February ; but it at 
times almost froze over again, the bottom ice did 
not break up, and a huge gorge, scores of miles in 
length, formed in and above the bend known as 
the Ox-bow, a long distance up-stream from my 
ranch. About the middle of March this great 
Ox-bow jam came down past us. It moved 
slowly, its front forming a high, crumbling 
wall, and creaming over like an immense 
breaker on the seashore: we could hear the dull 
roaring and crunching as it plowed down the river- 
bed long before it came in sight roimd the bend 
above us. The ice kept piling and tossing up in 
the middle, and not only heaped itself above the 
level of the banks, but also in many places spread 
out on each side beyond them, grinding against 
the Cottonwood trees in front of the ranch veranda, 
and at one moment bidding fair to overu'helm the 
house itself. It did not, however, but moved 
slowly down past us with that look of vast, resist- 
less, relentless force that any great body of moving 
ice, as a glacier, or an iceberg, always conveys to 
the beholder. The heaviest pressure from the 
water that was backed up behind being, of course, 
always in the middle, this part kept breaking 
away, and finally was pushed on clear through, 
leaving the river so changed that it could hardly 
be known. On each bank, and for a couple of 



Sheriff's Work on a Ranch 173 

hundred feet out from it into the stream, was a 
soHd mass of ice, edging the river along most of 
its length, at least as far as its course lay through 
lands that we knew; and in the narrow channel 
between the sheer ice-walls the water ran like a 
mill-race. 

At night the sno^y, glittering masses, tossed up 
and heaped into fantastic forms, shone like crystal 
in the moonlight ; but they soon lost their beauty, 
becoming fouled and blackened, and at the same 
time melted and settled down until it was possible 
to clamber out across the slippery hummocks. 

We had brought out a clinker-built boat espe- 
cially to ferry ourselves over the river when it was 
high, and were keeping our ponies on the opposite 
side, where there was a good range shut in by some 
very broken country that we knew they would 
not be apt to cross. This boat had already 
proved very useful and now came in handier than 
ever, as without it we could take no care of our 
horses. We kept it on the bank, tied to a tree, 
and every day would carry it or slide it across the 
hither ice bank, usually with not a little timibling 
and scrambling on our part, lower it gently into 
the swift current, pole it across to the ice on the 
farther bank, and then drag it over that, repeating 
the operation when w^e came back. One day we 
crossed and walked off about ten miles to a tract 
of wild and rugged country, cleft in every direction 



174 Ranch Life 

by ravines and cedar canyons, in the deepest of 
which we had left four deer hanging a fortnight 
before, as game thus hung up in cold weather 
keeps indefinitely. The walkiag was very bad, 
especially over the clay buttes; for the sun at 
midday had enough strength to thaw out the soil 
to the depth of a few inches only, and accordingly 
the steep hillsides were covered by a crust of slip- 
pery mud, with the frozen ground underneath. 
It was hard to keep one's footing, and to avoid 
falling while balancing along the knifelike ridge 
crests, or while clinging to the stunted sage brush 
as we went down into the valleys. The deer had 
been hung in a thicket of dwarfed cedars; but 
when we reached the place we found nothing save 
scattered pieces of their carcasses, and the soft 
mud was tramped all over with round, deeply 
marked footprints, some of them but a few hours 
old, showing that the plimderers of our cache were 
a pair of cougars — "moimtain lions," as they are 
called by the Westerners. They had evidently 
been at work for some time, and had eaten almost 
every scrap of flesh; one of the deer had been 
carried for some distance to the other side of a 
deep, narrow, chasmlike gully across which the 
cougar must have leaped with the carcass in its 
mouth. We followed the fresh trail of the cougars 
for some time, as it was well marked, especially in 
the snow still remaining in the bottoms of the 



Sheriff's Work on a Ranch 175 

deeper ravines ; finally it led into a tangle of rocky 
hills riven by dark cedar-clad gorges, in which we 
lost it, and we retraced our steps, intending to 
return on the morrow with a good track hound. 

But we never carried out our intentions, for 
next morning one of my men who was out before 
breakfast came back to the house with the start- 
ling news that our boat was gone — stolen, for he 
brought with him the end of the rope with which 
it had been tied, evidently cut off with a sharp 
knife ; and also a red woolen mitten with a leather 
palm, which he had picked up on the ice. We had 
no doubt as to who had stolen it; for whoever 
had done so had certainly gone down the river in 
it, and the only other thing in the shape of a boat 
on the Little j\Iissouri was a small flat-bottomed 
scow in the possession of three hard characters 
who lived in a shack, or hut, some twenty miles 
above us, and whom we had shrewdly suspected 
for some time of wishing to get out of the country, 
as certain of the cattlemen had begim openly to 
threaten to lynch them. They belonged to a class 
that always holds sway during the raw youth of 
a frontier community, and the putting down of 
which is the first step toward decent government. 
Dakota, west of the Missouri, has been settled 
very recently, and every town within it has seen 
strange antics performed during the past six or 
seven years. I^Iedora, in particular, has had more 



176 Ranch Life 

than its full share of shooting and stabbing affrays, 
horse-stealing, and cattle-killing. But the time 
for such things was passing away ; and during the 
preceding fall the vigilantes — locally known as 
"stranglers," in happy allusion to their summary 
method of doing justice — had made a clean sweep 
of the cattle country along the Yellowstone and 
that part of the Big Missouri around and below 
its mouth. Be it remarked, in passing, that while 
the outcome of their efforts had been in the main 
wholesome, yet, as is always the case in an ex- 
tended raid of vigilantes, several of the sixty odd 
victims had been perfectly innocent men who had 
been himg or shot in company with the real 
scoundrels, either through carelessness and 
misapprehension or on account of some personal 
spite. 

The three men we suspected had long been 
accused — justly or unjustly — of being implicated 
both in cattle-killing and in that worst of frontier 
crimes, horse-stealing : it was only by an accident 
that they had escaped the clutches of the vigi- 
lantes the preceding fall. Their leader was a 
well-built fellow named Finnigan, who had long 
red hair reaching to his shoulders, and always 
wore a broad hat and a fringed buckskin shirt. 
He was rather a hard case, and had been chief 
actor in a number of shooting scrapes. The other 
two were a half-breed, a stout, muscular man, and 



Sheriff's Work on a Ranch 177 

an old German, whose viciousness was of the weak 
and shiftless type. 

We knew that these three men were becoming 
iineasy and were anxious to leave the locality ; and 
we also knew that traveling on horseback, in the 
direction in which they would wish to go, was 
almost impossible, as the swollen, ice-fringed rivers 
could not be crossed at all, and the stretches of 
broken groimd would form nearly as impassable 
barriers. So we had little doubt that it was they 
who had taken our boat ; and as they knew there 
was then no boat left on the river, and as the 
country along its banks was entirely impracticable 
for horses, we felt sure they would be confident 
that there could be no pursuit. 

Accordingly we at once set to work in our turn 
to build a fiat-bottomed scow, wherein to follow 
them. Our loss was very annoying, and might 
prove a serious one if we were long prevented 
from crossing over to look after the saddle-band ; 
but the determining motive in our minds was 
neither chagrin nor anxiety to recover our prop- 
erty. In any wild country where the power of 
the law is little felt or heeded, and where every 
one has to rely upon himself for protection, men 
soon get to feel that it is in the highest degree 
imwise to submit to any wrong without making 
an immediate and resolute effort to avenge it 
upon the wrong-doers, at no matter what cost of 



178 Ranch Life 

risk or trouble. To submit tamely and meekly 
to theft, or to any other injury, is to invite almost 
certain repetition of the offense, in a place where 
self-reliant hardihood and the ability to hold one's 
own under all circumstances rank as the first of 
virtues. 

Two of my cowboys. Seawall and Dow, were 
originally from Maine, and were mighty men of 
their hands, skilled in woodcraft and the use of 
the ax, paddle, and rifle. They set to work with 
a will, and, as by good luck there were plenty of 
boards, in two or three days they had turned out 
a first-class flat-bottom, which was roomy, drew 
very little water, and was dry as a bone; and 
though, of course, not a handy craft, was easily 
enough managed in going down-stream. Into 
this we packed flour, coffee, and bacon enough 
to last us a fortnight or so, plenty of warm bed- 
ding, and the mess kit ; and early one cold March 
morning slid it into the icy current, took our seats, 
and shoved off down the river. 

There could have been no better men for a trip 
of this kind than my two companions. Seawall and 
Dow. They were tough, hardy, resolute fellows, 
quick as cats, strong as bears, and able to travel 
like bull moose. We felt very little uneasiness 
as to the result of a fight with the men we were 
after, provided we had anything like a fair show ; 
moreover, we intended, if possible, to get them at 



Sheriff's Work on a Ranch 179 

such a disadvantage that there would not be any 
fight at all. The only risk of any consequence 
that we ran was that of being ambushed ; for the 
extraordinary formation of the Bad Lands, with 
the groimd cut up into gullies, serried walls, and 
battlemented hilltops, makes it the coimtry of 
all others for hiding-places and ambuscades. 

For several days before we started the weather 
had been bitterly cold, as a furious blizzard was 
blo^ving; but on the day we left there was a lull, 
and we hoped a thaw had set in. We all were 
most warmly and thickly dressed, with woolen 
socks and underclothes, heavy jackets and trou- 
sers, and great fur coats, so that we felt we could 
bid defiance to the weather. Each carried his 
rifle, and we had in addition a double-barreled 
duck gun, for water-fowl and beaver. To manage 
the boat, we had paddles, heavy oars, and long 
iron-shod poles, Seawall steering while Dow sat 
in the bow. Altogether we felt as if we were off 
on a holiday trip, and set to work to have as good 
a time as possible. 

The river twisted in every direction, winding 
to and fro across the alluvial valley bottom, only 
to be brought up b}^ the rows of great barren 
buttes that boimded it on each edge. It had worn 
away the sides of these till they towered up as 
cliffs of clay, marl, or sandstone. Across their 
white faces the seams of coal drew sharp black 



i8o Ranch Life 

bands, and they were elsewhere blotched and 
varied with brown, yellow, purple, and red. This 
fantastic coloring, together with the jagged irregu- 
larity of their crests, channeled by the weather 
into spires, buttresses, and battlements, as well 
as their barrenness and the distinctness with 
which they loomed up through the high, dry air, 
gave them a look that was a singular mixture of 
the terrible and the grotesque. The bottoms were 
covered thickly with leafless cottonwood trees, 
or else with withered brown grass and stunted, 
sprawling sage bushes. At times the cliffs rose 
close to us on either hand, and again the valley 
would widen into a sinuous oval a mile or two long, 
bounded on every side, as far as our eyes could see, 
by a bluff line without a break, imtil, as we floated 
down close to its other end, there would suddenly 
appear in one comer a cleft through which the 
stream rushed out. As it grew dusk the shadowy 
outlines of the buttes lost nothing of their weird- 
ness ; the twilight only made their imcouth shape- 
lessness more grim and forbidding. They looked 
like the crouching figures of great goblin beasts. 

Those two hills on the right 
Crouched like two bulls locked horn in horn in fight — 
While to the left a tall scalped mountain. . , . 
The dying sunset kindled through a cleft: 
The hills, like giants at a hunting, lay 
Chin upon hand, to see the game at bay — 



Sheriff's Work on a Ranch i8i 

might well have been written after seeing the 
strange, desolate lands lying in western Dakota. 

All through the early part of the day we drifted 
swiftly down between the heaped-up piles of ice, 
the cakes and slabs now dirty and unattractive 
looking. Toward evening, however, there came 
long reaches where the banks on either side were 
bare, though even here there would every now 
and then be necks where the jam had been 
crowded into too narrow a spot and had risen 
over the side as it had done up-stream, grinding 
the bark from the big cottonwoods and snapping 
the smaller ones short off. In such places the ice- 
walls were sometimes eight or ten feet high, con- 
tinually undermined by the restless current ; and 
every now and then overhanging pieces would 
break off and slide into the stream with a loud 
sullen splash, like the plunge of some great water 
beast. Nor did we dare to go in too close to the 
high cliffs, as boulders and earth masses, freed 
by the thaw from the grip of the frost, kept roll- 
ing and leaping down their faces and forced us 
to keep a sharp lookout lest our boat should be 
swamped. 

At nightfall we landed, and made our camp on 
a point of wood-covered land jutting out into the 
stream. We had seen very little trace of life until 
late in the day, for the ducks had not yet arrived ; 
but in the afternoon a sharp-tailed prairie fowl 



1 82 Ranch Life 

flew across stream ahead of the boat, Hghting on 
a low branch by the water's edge. Shooting him, 
we landed and picked off two others that were 
perched high up in leafless cotton woods, plucking 
the buds. These three birds served us as supper; 
and shortly afterward, as the cold grew more and 
more biting, we rolled in under our furs and 
blankets and were soon asleep. 

In the morning it was evident that instead of 
thawing it had grown decidedly colder. The 
anchor ice was running thick in the river, and we 
spent the first hour or two after sunrise in hunting 
over the frozen swamp bottom for white-tail deer, 
of which there were many tracks; but we saw 
nothing. Then we broke camp and again started 
down-stream — a simple operation, as we had no 
tent, and all we had to do was to cord up our 
bedding, and gather the mess kit. It was colder 
than before, and for some time we went along in 
chilly silence, nor was it until midday that the 
sun warmed our blood in the least. The crooked 
bed of the current twisted hither and thither, but 
whichever way it went the icy north wind, blow- 
ing stronger all the time, drew steadily up it. 
One of us remarking that we bade fair to have 
it in our faces all day, the steersman annoiinced 
that we couldn't, unless it was the crookedest wind 
in Dakota ; and half an hour afterward we over- 
heard him muttering to himself that it was the 



Sheriff's Work on a Ranch 183 

crookedest wind in Dakota. We passed a group 
of tepees on one bottom, marking the deserted 
winter camp of some Grosventre Indians, which 
some of my men had visited a few months previ- 
ously on a trading expedition. It was almost the 
last point on the river with which we were ac- 
quainted. At midday we landed on a sand-bar 
for lunch — a simple enough meal, the tea being 
boiled over a fire of driftwood, that also fried the 
bacon, while the bread only needed to be baked 
every other day. Then we again shoved ofT. As 
the afternoon waned the cold grew still more bitter 
and the wind increased, blowing in fitful gusts 
against us, imtil it chilled us to the marrow when 
we sat still. But we rarely did sit still ; for even 
the rapid current was imable to urge the light- 
draught scow do-^Ti in the teeth of the strong 
blasts, and we only got her along by dint of hard 
work with pole and paddle. Long before the 
sun went dowTi the ice had begim to freeze on the 
handles of the poles, and we were not sorry to 
haul on shore for the night. For supper we again 
had prairie fowl, having shot four from a great 
patch of bulberry bushes late in the afternoon. 
A man doing hard open-air work in cold weather 
is always hungry for meat. 

During the night the thermometer went down 
to zero, and in the morning the anchor ice was 
running so thickly that we did not care to start 



1 84 Ranch Life 

at once, for it is most difficult to handle a boat 
in the deep frozen slush. Accordingly we took a 
couple of hours for a deer hunt, as there were 
evidently many white-tail on the bottom. We 
selected one long, isolated patch of tangled trees 
and brushwood, two of us beating through it 
while the other watched one end; but almost 
before we had begun four deer broke out at one 
side, loped easily off, evidently not much scared, 
and took refuge in a deep glen or gorge, densely 
wooded with cedars, that made a blind pocket in 
the steep side of one of the great plateaus boimd- 
ing the bottom. After a short consultation, one 
of our number crept round to the head of the 
gorge, making a wide detour, and the other two 
advanced up it on each side, thus completely sur- 
rounding the doomed deer. They attempted to 
break out past the man at the head of the glen, 
who shot down a couple, a buck and a yearling 
doe. The other two made their escape by run- 
ning off over ground so rough that it looked fitter 
to be crossed by their upland-loving cousins, the 
black-tail. 

This success gladdened our souls, insuring us 
plenty of fresh meat. We carried pretty much 
all of both deer back to camp, and, after a hearty 
breakfast, loaded our scow and started merrily 
off once more. The cold still continued intense, 
and as the day wore away we became numbed 



Sheriff's Work on a Ranch 185 

by it, until at last an incident occurred that set 
our blood running freely again. 

We were, of course, always on the alert, keep- 
ing a sharp lookout ahead and around us, and 
making as little noise as possible. Finally our 
watchfulness was rewarded, for in the middle of 
the afternoon of this, the third day we had been 
gone, as we came around a bend, we saw in front 
of us the lost boat, together with a scow, moored 
against the bank, while from among the bushes 
some little way back the smoke of a campfire 
curled up through the frosty air. We had come 
on the camp of the thieves. As I glanced at the 
faces of my two followers I was struck by the 
grim, eager look in their eyes. Our overcoats 
were off in a second, and after exchanging a few 
muttered words, the boat was hastily and silently 
shoved toward the bank. As soon as it touched 
the shore ice I leaped out and ran up behind a 
cliimp of bushes, so as to cover the landing of the 
others, who had to make the boat fast. For a 
moment we felt a thrill of keen excitement, and 
our veins tingled as we crept cautiously toward 
the fire, for it seemed likely that there would be 
a brush; but, as it turned out, this was almost 
the only moment of much interest, for the capture 
itself was as tame as possible. 

The men we were after knew they had taken 
with them the only craft there was on the river. 



i86 Ranch Life 

and so felt perfectly secure ; accordingly, we took 
them absolutely by surprise. The only one in 
camp was the German, whose weapons were on 
the ground, and who, of course, gave up at once, 
his two companions being off hunting. We made 
him safe, delegating one of our number to look 
after him particularly and see that he made no 
noise, and then sat down and waited for the 
others. The camp was under the lee of a cut 
bank, behind which we crouched, and, after wait- 
ing an hour or over, the men we were after came 
in. We heard them a long way off and made 
ready, watching them for some minutes as they 
walked toward us, their rifles on their shoulders 
and the sunlight glinting on the steel barrels. 
When they were within twenty yards or so we 
straightened up from behind the bank, covering 
them with our cocked rifles, while I shouted to 
them to hold up their hands — an order that in 
such a case, in the West, a man is not apt to dis- 
regard if he thinks the giver is in earnest. The 
half-breed obeyed at once, his knees trembling as 
if they had been made of whalebone. Finnigan 
hesitated for a second, his eyes fairly wolfish; 
then, as I walked up within a few paces, covering 
the center of his chest so as to avoid overshooting, 
and repeating the command, he saw that he had 
no show, and, with an oath, let his rifle drop and 
held his hands up beside his head. 



Sheriff's Work on a Ranch 187 

It was nearly dusk, so we camped where we 
w^ere. The first thing to be done was to collect 
enough wood to enable us to keep a blazing fire 
all night long. While Seawall and Dow, thor- 
oughly at home in the use of the ax, chopped 
down dead cottonwood trees and dragged the 
logs up into a huge pile, I kept guard over the 
three prisoners, who were huddled into a sullen 
group some twenty yards off, just the right dis- 
tance for the buckshot in the double-barrel. 
Having captured our men, we were in a quandary 
how to keep them. The cold was so intense that 
to tie them tightly hand and foot meant, in all 
likelihood, freezmg both hands and feet off during 
the night; and it was no use tying them at all 
unless we tied them tightly enough to stop in part 
the circulation. So nothing was left for us to do 
but to keep perpetual guard over them. Of 
course we had carefully searched them, and 
taken away not only their firearms and knives, 
but everything else that could possibly be used as 
a weapon. By this time they were pretty well 
cowed, as they found out very quickly that they 
would be well treated so long as the}^ remained 
quiet, but would receive some rough handling if 
they attempted any disturbance. 

Our next step was to cord their weapons up in 
some bedding, which we sat on while we took sup- 
per. Immediately afterward we made the men 



1 88 Ranch Life 

take off their boots — an additional safeguard, as 
it was a cactus country, in which a man could 
travel barefoot only at the risk of almost certainly 
laming himself for life — and go to bed, all three 
lying on one buffalo robe and being covered by 
another, in the full light of the blazing fire. We 
determined to watch in succession a half-night 
apiece, thus each getting a full rest every third 
night. I took first watch, my two companions, 
revolver under head, rolling up in their blankets 
on the side of the fire opposite that on which the 
three captives lay; while I, in fur cap, gantlets, 
and overcoat, took my station a little way back 
in the circle of firelight, in a position in which I 
could watch my men with the absolute certainty 
of being able to stop any movement, no matter 
how sudden. For this night-watching we always 
used the double-barrel with buckshot, as a rifle 
is imcertain in the dark ; while with a shotgim at 
such a distance, and with men lying down, a 
person who is watchful may be sure that they can- 
not get up, no matter how quick they are, without 
being riddled. The only danger lies in the extreme 
monotony of sitting still in the dark guarding 
men who make no motion, and the consequent ten- 
dency to go to sleep, especially when one has had 
a hard day's work and is feeling really tired. But 
neither on the first night nor on any subsequent 
one did we ever abate a jot of our watchfulness. 



Sheriffs Work on a Ranch 189 

Next morning we started down -stream, having 
a well-laden flotilla, for the men we had caught 
had a good deal of plxinder in their boats, in- 
cluding some saddles, as they evidently intended 
to get horses as soon as they reached a part of 
the coimtry where there were any, and where it 
was possible to travel. Finnigan, who was the 
ringleader, and the man I was especially after, I 
kept by my side in our boat, the other two being 
put in their own scow, heavily laden and rather 
leaky, and with only one paddle. We kept them 
just in front of us, a few yards distant, the river 
being so broad that we knew, and they knew also, 
any attempt at escape to be perfectly hopeless. 

For some miles we went swiftly down-stream, 
the cold being bitter and the slushy anchor ice 
choking the space between the boats; then the 
current grew sluggish, eddies forming along the 
sides. We paddled on imtil, coming into a long 
reach where the water was almost backed up, we 
saw there was a stoppage at the other end. Work- 
ing up to this, it proved to be a small ice jam, 
through which we broke our way only to find our- 
selves, after' a few hundred yards, stopped by 
another. We had hoped that the first was merely 
a jam of anchor ice, caused by the cold of the last 
few days ; but the jam we had now come to was 
black and solid, and, nmning the boats ashore, 
one of us went off dowTi the bank to find out what 



I90 Ranch Life 

the matter was. On climbing a hill that com- 
manded a view of the valley for several miles, the 
explanation became only too evident, — as far as 
we could see, the river was choked with black ice. 
The great Ox-bow jam had stopped, and we had 
come down to its tail. 

We had nothing to do but to pitch camp, after 
which we held a consultation. The Little Mis- 
souri has much too swift a current, — when it has 
any current at all, — with too bad a bottom, for 
it to be possible to take a boat up-stream ; and to 
walk meant, of course, abandoning almost all we 
had. Moreover we knew that a thaw would very 
soon start the jam, and so made up our minds that 
we had best simply stay where we were, and work 
dowTL-stream as fast as we could, trusting that the 
spell of bitter weather would pass before our food 
gave out. 

The next eight days were as irksome and 
monotonous as any I ever spent: there is very 
little amusement in combining the fimctions of 
a sheriff with those of an arctic explorer. The 
weather kept as cold as ever. During the night 
the water in the pail would freeze solid. Ice 
formed all over the river, thickly along the banks ; 
and the clear, frosty sim gave us so little warmth 
that the melting hardly began before noon. Each 
day the great jam would settle dowm-stream a 
few miles, only to wedge again, leaving behind 



Sheriffs Work on a Ranch 191 

it several smaller jams, through which we would 
work our way until we were as close to the tail of 
the large one as we dared to go. Once we came 
round a bend and got so near that we were in a 
good deal of danger of being sucked imder. The 
current ran too fast to let us work back against 
it, and we could not pull the boat up over the 
steep banks of rotten ice, which were breaking off 
and falling in all the time. We could only land 
and snub the boats up with ropes, holding them 
there for two or three hours until the jam worked 
down once more — all the time, of course, having 
to keep guard over the captives, who had caused 
us so much trouble that we were boimd to bring 
them in, no matter what else we lost. 

We had to be additionally cautious on account 
of being in the Indian country, having worked 
down past Killdeer Mountains, where some of my 
cowboys had run across a band of Sioux — said to 
be Tetons — the year before. Very probably the 
Indians would not have harmed us anyhow, but 
as we were hampered by the prisoners, we pre- 
ferred not meeting them ; nor did we, though we 
saw plenty of fresh signs, and found, to our 
sorrow, that they had just made a grand himt 
all dowTi the river, and had killed or driven off 
almost every head of game in the coimtry through 
which we were passing. 

As our stock of provisions grew scantier and 



192 Ranch Life 

scantier, we tried in vain to eke it out by the 
chase ; for we saw no game. Two of us would go 
out hunting at a time, while the third kept guard 
over the prisoners. The latter would be made to 
sit down together on a blanket at one side of the 
fire, while the guard for the time being stood or 
sat some fifteen or twenty yards off. The pris- 
oners being unarmed, and kept close together, 
there was no possibility of their escaping, and 
the guard kept at such a distance that they could 
not overpower him by springing on him, he having 
a "Winchester or the double-barreled shot-gun 
always in his hands cocked and at the ready. 
So long as we kept wide-awake and watchful, 
there was not the least danger, as our three men 
knew us, and understood perfectly that the 
slightest attempt at a break would result in their 
being shot down ; but, although there was thus 
no risk, it was harassing, tedious work, and the 
strain, day in and day out, without any rest or 
let up, became very tiresome. 

The days were monotonous to a degree. The 
endless rows of hills bounding the valley, barren 
and naked, stretched along without a break. 
When we rounded a bend, it was only to see on 
each hand the same lines of broken buttes 
dwindlmg off into the distance ahead of us as 
they had dwmdled off into the distance behind. 
If, in hunting, we climbed to their tops, as far 



Sheriff's Work on a Ranch 193 

as our eyes could scan there was nothing but the 
great rolling prairie, bleak and lifeless, reaching 
off to the horizon. We broke camp in the 
morning, on a point of land covered with brown, 
leafless, frozen cottonwoods ; and in the afternoon 
we pitched camp on another point in the midst 
of a grove of the same stiff, dreary trees. The 
discolored river, whose eddies boiled into yellow 
foam, flowed always between the same banks of 
frozen mud or of muddy ice. And what was, 
from a practical standpoint, even worse, our diet 
began to be as same as the scenery. Being able 
to kill nothing, we exhausted all our stock of 
provisions, and got reduced to flour, without 
yeast or baking-powder; and -unleavened bread, 
made with exceedingly muddy water, is not, as a 
steady thing, attractive. 

Finding that they were well treated and were 
also watched with the closest vigilance, our pris- 
oners behaved themselves excellently and gave 
no trouble, though afterward, w^hen out of our 
hands and shut up in jail, the half-breed got into 
a stabbing affray. They conversed freely with 
my two men on a number of indifferent subjects, 
and after the first evening no allusion was made 
to the theft, or anything connected with it; so 
that an outsider overhearing the conversation 
would never have guessed what our relations to 
each other really were. Once, and once only, did 
13 



194 Ranch Life 

Finnigan broach the subject. Somebody had 
been speaking of a man whom we all knew, called 
"Calamity," who had been recently taken by the 
sheriff on a charge of horse-stealing. Calamity 
had escaped once, but was caught at a disadvan- 
tage the next time; nevertheless, when sum- 
moned to hold his hands up, he refused, and 
attempted to draw his own revolver, with the 
result of having two bullets put through him. 
Finnigan commented on Calamity as a fool for 
"not knowing when a man had the drop on him ;" 
and then, suddenly turning to me, said, his 
weather-beaten face flushing darkly: "If I'd had 
any show at all, you'd have sure had to fight, 
Mr. Roosevelt ; but there wasn't any use making 
a break when I'd only have got shot myself, with 
no chance of harming anyone else." I laughed 
and nodded, and the subject was dropped. 

Indeed, if the time was tedious to us, it must 
have seemed never-ending to our prisoners, who 
had nothing to do but to lie still and read, or 
chew the bitter cud of their reflections, always 
conscious that some pair of eyes was watching 
them every moment, and that at least one loaded 
rifle was ever ready to be used against them. 
They had quite a stock of books, some of a 
rather unexpected kind. Dime novels and the 
inevitable "History of the James Brothers" — a 
book that, together with the "Police Gazette," 



Sheriff's Work on a Ranch 195 

is to be found in the hands of every professed or 
putative ruffian in the West — seemed perfectly in 
place; but it was somewhat surprising to find 
that a large number of more or less drearily silly 
"society" novels, ranging from Ouida's to those 
of The Duchess and Augusta J. Evans, were most 
greedily devoured. As for me, I had brought 
with me "Anna Karenina," and my surroundings 
were quite gray enough to harmonize well with 
Tolstoi. 

Our commons grew shorter and shorter; and 
finally even the flour was nearly gone, and we 
were again forced to think seriously of abandoning 
the boats. The Indians had driven all the deer 
out of the country; occasionally we shot prairie 
fowl, but they were not plentiful. A flock of 
geese passed us one morning, and afterward an 
old gander settled down on the river near our 
camp; but he was over two hundred yards off, 
and a rifle-shot missed him. Where he settled 
doT\Ti, by the way, the river was covered with 
thick glare ice that would just bear his weight; 
and it was curious to see him stretch his legs out 
in front and slide forty or fifty feet when he 
struck, balancing himself with his outspread 
wings. 

But when the day was darkest the dawn 
appeared. At last, having worked down some 
thirty miles at the tail of the ice jam, we struck 



196 Ranch Life 

an outlying cow-camp of the C Diamond (C O) 
ranch, and knew that our troubles were almost 
over. There was but one cowboy in it, but we 
were certain of his cordial help, for in a stock 
country all make common cause against either 
horse-thieves or cattle-thieves. He had no wagon, 
but told us we could get one up at a ranch near 
Killdeer Mountains, some fifteen miles off, and 
lent me a pony to go up there and see about it — 
which I accordingly did, after a sharp preHminary 
tussle when I came to mount the wiry bronco 
(one of my men remarking in a loud aside to our 
cowboy host, "the boss ain't no bronco-buster"). 
When I reached the solitar^^ ranch spoken of, I 
was able to hire a large prairie schooner and two 
tough little bronco mares, driven by the settler 
himself, a fugged old plainsman, who evidently 
could hardly understand why I took so much 
bother w4th the thieves instead of hanging them 
off-hand. Returning to the river the next day, 
we walked our men up to the Killdeer Moimtains. 
Seawall and Dow left me the following morning, 
went back to the boats, and had no further diffi- 
culty, for the weather set in very warm, the ice 
went through with a rush, and they reached 
Mandan in about ten days, killing four beaver 
and five geese on the way, but lacking time to 
stop to do any regular hunting. 

Meanwhile I took the three thieves into Dick- 



Sheriffs Work on a Ranch 197 

inson, the nearest town. The going was bad, and 
the httle mares could only drag the wagon at a 
walk; so, though we drove during the daylight, 
it took us two days and a night to make the 
journey. It was a most desolate drive. The 
prairie had been burned the fall before, and was 
a mere bleak waste of blackened earth, and a 
cold, rainy mist lasted throughout the two days. 
The only variety was where the road crossed the 
shallow headwaters of Knife and Green rivers. 
Here the ice was high along the banks, and the 
wagon had to be taken to pieces to get it over. 
My three captives were imarmed, but as I was 
alone with them, except for the driver, of whom 
I knew nothing, I had to be doubly on my guard, 
and never let them close to me. The little 
mares went so slowly, and the heavy road ren- 
dered any hope of escape by flogging up the 
horses so entirely out of the question, that I soon 
found the safest plan was to put the prisoners in 
the wagon, and myself walk behind with the in- 
inevitable Winchester. Accordingly I trudged 
steadily the whole time behind the wagon through 
the ankle-deep mud. It was a gloomy walk. 
Hour after hour went by always the same, while 
I plodded along through the dreary landscape 
— himger, cold, and fatigue struggling with a 
sense of dogged, weary resolution. At night, 
when we put up at the squalid hut of a frontier 



198 Ranch Life 

granger, the only habitation on our road, it was 
even worse. I did not dare to go to sleep, but 
making my three men get into the upper bunk, 
from which they could get out only with diffi- 
culty, I sat up with my back against the cabin- 
door and kept watch over them all night long. 
So, after thirty-six hours' sleeplessness, I was most 
heartily glad when we at last jolted into the long, 
straggling main street of Dickinson, and I was 
able to give my unwilling companions into the 
hands of the sheriff. 

Under the laws of Dakota I received my fees 
as a deputy sheriff for making the three arrests, 
and also mileage for the three hundred odd miles 
gone over — a total of some fifty dollars.* 

*One of the men wrote me from prison, giving me his 
reasons for taking the boat. Part of his letter is worth 
giving, not only because it contains his own story, but also 
for the sake of the delicious sense of equality shown in the 
last few sentences. He had been explaining that he believed 
I had accused him of stealing some saddles: "In the first 
place I did not take your boat Mr. Roosevelt because I 
wanted to steal something, no indeed, when I took that 
vessel I was labouring under the impression, die dog or eat 
the hachette. . . . When I was a couple of miles above 
your ranch the boat I had sprung a leak and I saw that I could 
not make the Big IMissouri in it in the shape that it was in. 
I thought of asking assistance of you, but I supposed that 
you had lost some saddles and blamed me for taking them. 
Now there I was with a leaky boat and under the circum- 
stances what was I two do, two ask you for help, the answer 
I expected two get was two look down the mouth of a Win- 



Sheriff's \\^ork on a Ranch 199 

Chester. I saw your boat and made up my mind two get 
possession of it. I was bound two get out of that country 
cost what it might, when people talk lynch law and threaten 
a persons life, I think that it is about time two leave. I did 
not want to go back up river on the account that I feared a 

mob I have read a good many of your sketches of 

ranch life in the papers since I have been here, and they 
interested me deeply. 

"Yours sincerely, 
"&c. 
"P. S. Should you stop over at Bismarck this fall make 
a call to the Prison. I should be glad to meet you." 



CHAPTER IX. 

THE ranchman's RIFLE ON CRAG AND PRAIRIE. 

THE ranchman owes to his rifle not only the 
keen pleasure and strong excitement of the 
chase, but also much of his bodily comfort ; 
for, save for his prowess as a hunter and his skill 
as a marksman with this, his favorite weapon, he 
would almost always be sadly stinted for fresh 
meat. Now that the buffalo have gone, and the 
Sharps rifle by which they were destroyed is also 
gone, almost all ranchmen use some form of 
repeater. Personally I prefer the Winchester, 
using the new model, with a 45-caliber bullet of 
300 grains, backed by 90 grains of powder, or else 
falling back on my faithful old stand-by, the 
45-75. But the truth is that all good modem 
rifles are efficient weapons ; it is the man behind 
the gun that makes the difference. An inch or 
two in trajectory or a second or two in rapidity 
of fire is as nothing compared to sureness of eye 
and steadiness of hand. 

From April to August antelope are the game 
we chiefly follow, killing only the bucks; after 
that season, black-tail and white-tail deer. Now 
and then we get a chance at mountain sheep, and 
more rarely at larger game still. As a rule, I 

200 



The Ranchman's Rifle 201 

never shoot anything but bucks. But in the 
rutting season, when the bucks' flesh is poor, or 
when we need to lay in a good stock of meat for 
the winter, this rule of course must be broken. 

The smoked venison stored away in the fall 
lasts us through the bitter weather, as well as 
through the even less attractive period covering 
the first weeks of spring. At that time we go 
out as little as possible. The roads are mere 
morasses, crusted after nightfall with a shell of 
thin ice, through which the shaggy horses break 
heavily. Walking is exceedingly tiresome, the 
boots becoming caked with masses of adhesive 
clay. The deer stay with us all the time; but 
they are now in poor condition, the does heavy 
with fawn and the bucks with ungrown 
antlers. 

Antelope gather together in great bands in the 
fall, and either travel south, leaving the country 
altogether, or else go to some out-of-the-way 
place w^here they are not likely to be disturbed. 
Antelope are queer, freaky beasts, and it is hard 
to explain why, when most of these great bands 
go off south, one or two always stay in the Bad 
Lands. Such a band having chosen its wintering 
groimd, which is usually in a valley or on a range 
of wide plateaus, will leave it only with great 
reluctance, and if it is discovered by himters most 
of its members ^vHll surely be butchered before 



202 Ranch Life 

the survivors are willing to abandon the place 
and seek new quarters. 

In April the prong-homed herds come back, 
but now all broken up into straggling parties. 
They have regular passes, through which they go 
every year: there is one such not far from my 
ranch, where they are certain to cross the Little 
Missouri in great numbers each spring on their 
return march. In the fall, when they are travel- 
ing in dense crowds, hunters posted in these 
passes sometimes butcher enormous numbers. 

Soon after they come back in the spring they 
scatter out all over the plains, and for four 
months after their return — that is, until August — 
they are the game we chiefly follow. This is 
because at that time we only himt enough to keep 
the ranch in fresh meat, and kill nothing but the 
bucks; and as antelope, though they shed their 
horns, are without them for but a very short 
time, and as, moreover, they are always seen at a 
distance, it is easy to tell the sexes apart. 

Antelope shooting is the kind in which a man 
most needs skill in the use of the rifle at long 
ranges ; for they are harder to get near than any 
other game — partly from their wariness, and still 
more from the nature of the ground they inhabit. 
Many more cartridges are spent, in proportion 
to the amount of game killed, in hunting antelope 
than is the case while after deer, elk, or sheep. 



The Ranchman's Rifle 203 

Even good hunters reckon on using six or seven 
cartridges for every prong-horn that they kill; 
for antelope are continually offering standing 
shots at very long distances, which, nevertheless, 
it is a great temptation to try, on the chance of 
luck favoring the marksman. Moreover, alone 
among plains' game, they must generally be shot 
at over a himdred and fifty yards, and often at 
between two and three himdred. Over this dis- 
tance, a man will kill occasionally, — I have done 
so myself, — but at such long range it is mainly a 
matter of accident. The best field-shot alive 
lacks a good deal of always killing, if the distance 
is much over two hundred yards ; and with every 
increase beyond that amoimt, the chances of 
failure augment in geometrical proportion. Ex- 
ceptional individuals perform marvelous feats 
with the rifle, exactly as still more exceptional 
individuals perform marv^elous feats with the 
revolver; but even these men, when they have to 
guess their distances, miss very often when firing 
at game three hundred yards, or thereabouts, 
distant. 

As in all other kinds of big-game shooting, 
success in hunting antelope often depends upon 
sheer, downright luck. A man may make a 
week's trip over good ground and get nothing; 
and then again he may go to the same place and 
in two days kill a wagon-load of venison. 



204 Ranch Life 

In the fall the prairie fires ravage the land, for 
at the close of summer the matted, sun-dried 
grass bums like tinder, and the fires are some- 
times so numerous as to cover whole coimties 
beneath a pall of smoke, while at night they look 
very grand, burning in curved lines of w^avering 
flame, now advancing fastest at one point, now 
at another, as if great red snakes were writhing 
sideways across the prairie. The land across 
which they have run remains a blackened, charred 
waste until the young grass begins to sprout in the 
spring. The short, tender blades at once change 
the cinder-colored desert into a bright emerald 
plain, and are so much more toothsome than the 
dry, withered winter grass that both stock and 
game forsake the latter and travel out to the 
tracts of burned land. The feed on these places 
is too sparse to support, of itself, horses or cattle, 
who accordingly do not penetrate far beyond the 
edges; but antelope are like sheep, and prefer 
scanty, short herbage, and in consequence at this 
time fairly swarm in the burned districts. Indeed, 
they are sometimes so numerous that they can 
hardly be stalked, as it is impossible to approach 
any animal without being seen by some of its 
countless comrades, which at once run off and 
give the alarm. 

While on these early spring trips we sometimes 
vary the sport, and our fare as well, by trying 



The Ranchman's Rifle 205 

our rifles on the mallards in the reedy sloughs, 
or on the jack rabbits as they sit up on their 
haunches to look at us, eighty or a hundred yards 
off. Now and then we creep up to and kill the 
cock prairie fowl, when they have gathered into 
their dancing rings to posture with outstretched 
neck and outspread wings as they shuffle round 
each other, keeping up a curious clucking and 
booming that accord well with their grotesque 
attitudes. 

Late in the season any one of us can usually 
get antelope in a day's hunt from the ranch by 
merely riding off alone, with a good hunting 
horse, to a great tract of broken, mound-dotted 
prairie some fifteen miles off, where the prong- 
horns are generally abundant. 

On such a trip I leave the ranch house by dawn, 
the rifle across my saddle-bow, and some strips 
of smoked venison in the saddle-pockets. In the 
cool air the horse lopes smartly through the 
wooded bottoms. The meadow-larks, with black 
crescents on their yellow breasts, sing all day 
long, but the thrushes only in the morning and 
evening ; and their melody is heard at its best on 
such a ride as this. By the time I get out of the 
last ravines and canter along the divide, the dark 
bluff-tops in the east have begim to redden in 
the sunrise, while in the flushed west the hills 
stand out against a rosy sky. The sun has been 



2o6 Ranch Life 

up some little time before the hunting-grounds 
are fairly reached ; for the antelope stands alone 
in being a diurnal game animal that from this 
peculiarity, as well as from the nature of its 
haimts, can be himted as well at midday as at 
any other hour. Arrived at the hunting-grounds 
I generally, but not always, dismount and himt 
on foot, leaving the horse tethered out to graze. 

Limch is taken at some spring, which may be 
only a trickle of water at the base of a butte, 
where a hole must be dug out with knife and 
hands before the horse can drink. Once or twice 
I have enjoyed unusual delicacies at such a liinch, 
in the shape of the eggs of curlew or prairie 
fowl baked in the hot ashes. 

The day is spent in still-hunting, a much easier 
task among the ridges and low hills than out on 
the gently rolling prairies. Antelope see much 
better than deer, their great bulging eyes, placed 
at the roots of the horns, being as strong as twin 
telescopes. Extreme care must be taken not to 
let them catch a glimpse of the intruder, for it is 
then hopeless to attempt approaching them. On 
the other hand, there is never the least difficulty 
about seeing them; for they are conspicuous 
beasts, and, unlike deer, they never hide, being 
careless whether they are seen or not, so long as 
they can keep a good lookout. They trust only 
to their own alert watchfulness and quick senses 



The Ranchman's Rifle 207 

for safety. The game is carried home behind the 
saddle ; and the bottom on which the ranch house 
stands is not often reached until the moon, 
showing crimson through the haze, has risen 
above the bluffs that skirt the river. 

Antelope are very tough, and will carry off a 
great deal of lead imless struck in exactly the 
right place; and even when mortally hit they 
sometimes receive the blow without flinching, 
and gallop off as if unharmed. They always 
should be followed up a little distance after being 
fired at, as if unhurt. Sometimes they show the 
rather curious trait of walking backward a 
number of steps just before falling in death. 

Although ordinarily harder to get at than deer, 
they are far more frequently killed in what may 
be called accidental ways. At times they seem 
to be heedless of danger, and they suffer from 
occasional panic fits of fear or curiosity, when it 
is no feat at all to slay them. Hunters can thus 
occasionally rake very large bags of antelope, but 
a true sportsman who only shoots for peculiarly 
fine trophies, or to supply the ranch table, will 
not commit such needless butcheries. Often acci- 
dents have throwTi it into my power to make a 
big killing; but the largest number I have ever 
shot was on one day when I bagged four, all 
bucks, and then we were sorely in need of fresh 
meat, and it was an object to get as much as 



2o8 Ranch Life 

possible. This day's shooting was peculiar be- 
cause it took place during a heavy rain-storm, 
which, taken in connection with my own remark- 
able costume, apparently made the animals act 
with less than their usual shyness. I wore a 
great flapping yellow slicker, or oilskin overcoat, 
about as unlikely a garb as a himter could pos- 
sibly don; but it seemed to fascinate the game, 
for more than once a band huddled up and stood 
gazing at me, while I clambered awkw-^ardly off 
the horse. The cold rain numbed my fingers and 
beat into my eyes, and I was hampered by the 
coat; so I wasted a good many cartridges to get 
my four head. 

In some places they now seem to have learned 
wisdom, for the slaughter among them has been 
so prodigious that the survivors have radically 
changed their character. Their senses are as 
keen as ever, and their wits much keener. They 
no longer give way to bursts of panic curiosity; 
they cannot be attracted by any amount of 
flagging, or by the appearance of imknown 
objects, as formerly. Where they are still com- 
mon, as with us, they refuse, under any stress of 
danger, to enter woodland or thickets, but keep 
to the flat or broken plains and the open prairies, 
which they have from time immemorial inhabited. 
But elsewhere their very nature seems to have 
altered. They have not only learned to climb 



The Ranchman's Rifle 209 

and take to the hills, but, what is even more 
singular, have intruded on the domain of the elk 
and the deer, frequently making their abode in 
the thick timber, and there proving the most 
difficult of all animals to stalk. 

In May and June the little antelope kids appear: 
fimny little fellows, odd and ungainly, but at an 
astonishingly early age able to nm nearly as fast 
as their parents. They will lie very close if they 
think that they are unobserved. Once several of 
us were driving in a herd of cattle while on the 
roimd-up. The cattle, traveling in loose order, 
were a few paces ahead, when, happening to cast 
dowTi my eyes, I saw, right among their hoofs, 
a little antelope kid. It was lying flat down with 
outstretched neck, and did not move, although 
some of the cattle almost stepped on it. I reined 
up, got off my horse, and lifted it in my arms. 
At first it gave two or three convulsive struggles, 
bleating sharply, then became perfectly passive, 
standing quietly by me for a minute or two when 
I put it douTi, after which it suddenly darted off 
like a flash. These little antelope kids are very 
easily tamed, being then very familiar, amusing, 
and inquisitive — much more so than deer fa\Mis, 
though they are not so pretty. Within a few 
days of their birth they stop seeking protection 
in hiding and adopt the habits of their parents, 
following them everywhere, or going off on their 

14 



2IO Ranch Life 

own account, being almost as swift, although, of 
course, not nearly so enduring. 

Three of us witnessed a rather curious incident 
last spring, show^ing how little the bringing forth 
of a fawn affects the does of either deer or ante- 
lope. We were walking through a patch of low 
brushwood, when up got a black-tail doe and 
went off at full speed. At the second jump she 
gave birth to a fawn ; but this did not alter her 
speed in the least, and she ran off quite as well 
and as fast as ever. We walked up to where she 
had been lying and found in her bed another fawn, 
evidently but a few seconds old. We left the two 
sprawling, unlicked little creatures where they 
were, knowing that the mother would soon be 
back to care for them. 

Although sometimes we go out to the antelope 
ground and back in one day, yet it is always more 
convenient to take the buckboard with us and 
spend the night, camping by a water hole in one 
of the creeks. The last time we took such a trip 
I got lost, and nearly spent the night in the open. 
I had been riding with one of my cowboys, while 
another acted as teamster and drove the buck- 
board and pair. We killed two antelope and 
went into camp rather early. After taking dinner 
and picketing out the four horses we foimd it still 
lacked an hour or two of sunset, and accordingly 
my companions and I started out on foot, leaving 



The Ranchman's Rifle 211 

our teamster in camp, and paying no particular 
heed to our surroundings. We saw a herd of 
prong-horn and wounded one, which we followed 
in vain until dusk, and then started to go back to 
camp. Very soon we found that we had quite a 
task before us, for in the dim starlight all the 
hollows looked exactly alike, and the buttes 
seemed either to have changed form entirely or 
else loomed up so vaguely through the darkness 
that we could not place them in the least. We 
walked on and on until we knew that we must be 
far past the creek, or coulee, where our camp lay, 
and then turned toward the divide. The night 
had grown steadily darker, and we could hear the 
far-off mutter and roll that told of an approaching 
thimder-storm. Hour after hour we trudged 
wearily on, as fast as we could go without 
stumbling, the gloom and the roughness of the 
unknown ground proving serious drawbacks to 
our progress. When on the top of a hillock, the 
blackness of the hollow beneath was so intense 
that we could not tell whether we were going 
to walk down a slope or over a cliff, and in con- 
sequence we met with one or two tumbles. At 
last we reached the top of a tall butte that we 
knew must be on the divide. The night was now 
as dark as pitch, and we were so entirely unable 
to tell where we were that we decided to give up 
the quest in despair and try to find some washout 



212 Ranch Life 

that would yield us at least partial shelter from 
the approaching rain-storm. We had fired off 
our rifles several times without getting any re- 
sponse ; but now, as we took one last look around, 
we suddenly saw a flash of light, evidently from a 
gun, flare up through the darkness so far off that 
no sound came to our ears. We trotted toward 
it as fast as we could through the inky gloom, 
and when no longer sure of our direction climbed 
a little hill, fired off our rifles, and after a minute 
or two again saw the guiding flash. The next 
time we had occasion to signal, the answering 
blaze was accompanied by a faint report ; and in 
a few minutes more, when it was close on mid- 
night, we were warming our hands at the great 
camp-fire, and hungrily watching the venison 
steaks as they sizzled in the frying-pan. 

The morning after this adventure I shot an 
antelope before breakfast. We had just risen, 
and while sitting roimd the smoldering coals, 
listening to the simmering of the camp-kettle and 
the coffee-pot, we suddenly caught sight of a large 
prong-horn buck that was walking toward us over 
the hill-crest nearly half a mile away. He stopped 
and stared fixedly at us for a few minutes, and 
then resumed his course at a leisurely trot, occa- 
sionally stopping to crop a mouthful of grass, and 
paying no further heed to us. His course was 
one that would lead him within a quarter of a 



The Ranchman's Rifle 213 

mile of camp, and, grasping my rifle, I slipped off 
as soon as he was out of sight and ran up over 
the bluff to intercept him. Just as I reached the 
last crest I saw the buck crossing in front of me 
at a walk, and almost two hundred yards off. 
I knelt, and, as he halted and turned his head 
sharply toward me, pulled trigger. It was a 
lucky shot, and he fell over, with his back broken. 
He had very unusually good horns; as fine as 
those of any of his kind that I ever killed. 

Antelope often suffer from such freaks of 
apathetic indifference to danger, which are doubly 
curious as existing in an animal normally as wary 
as that wildest of game, the mountain sheep. 
They are fond of wandering, too, and appear at 
times in very unlikely places. Thus once, while 
we were building the cow corral, in an open 
bottom, five antelope came down. After much 
snorting and stamping, they finally approached 
to within fifty yards of the men who were at work, 
and, as the latter had no weapons with them, 
retired unmolested. 

In winter the great herds consist of the two 
sexes ; and this is true also of the straggling parties 
that come back to us in spring, soon to split up 
into smaller ones. During early summer the 
males may be found singly, or else three or four 
together, with possibly a barren doe or two ; while 
two or three does, with their kids, and perhaps 



214 Ranch Life 

the last year's young, will forni the nucleus of a 
little flock by themselves. With the coming of 
the rutting season they divide into regular bands, 
for they are polygamous. Every large, powerful 
buck gathers his little group of does, driving out 
all his rivals, though perhaps a yearling buck or 
two will hang round the outskirts at a respectful 
distance, every now and then rousing the older 
one to a fit of jealous impatience. More often 
the young bucks go in small parties by them- 
selves, while those older ones that have been 
driven out by their successful rivals wander 
roimd singly. The old bucks are truculent and 
courageous, and do fierce battle with each other 
until it is evident which is master, when the 
defeated combatant makes off at top speed. One 
of these beaten bucks will occasionally get hold 
of a single doe, whom he promptly appropriates 
and guards with extreme watchfulness; and, not 
being overconfident in his own prowess, drives her 
off very rapidly if any other antelope show signs 
of coming near. A successful buck may have 
from four or five to ten or fifteen does in his 
harem. In such a band there is always an old 
doe that acts as leader, precisely as with deer 
and elk. This doc is ever on the alert, is most 
likely to take the alarm at the approach of 
danger, and always leads the flight. The buck, 
however, is prompt to take command, if he sees 



The Ranchman's Rifle 215 

fit, or deems that the doe's fears have over- 
powered her judgment; and frequently, when a 
band is in full flight, the buck may be seen 
deliberately to round it up and stop it, so that 
he may gaze on the cause of the alarm — a trait 
the exercise of which often costs him his life. 
The bucks occasionally bully the does unmerci- 
fully, if they show symptoms of insubordination. 
Individual antelope vary very widely in speed. 
Once I fairly rode one down, but this is generally 
an almost impossible feat. Among deer, the fat, 
heavy antlered bucks are usually slower than the 
does and the young males ; but there seems to be 
little difference of this sort among prong-horns. 

With the first touch of sharp fall weather we 
abandon the chase of the antelope for that of the 
deer. Then our favorite quarry is the noble 
black-tail, whose haunts are in the mountains 
and the high, craggy hills. We kill him by fair 
still-hunting, and to follow him successfully 
through the deep ravines and across the steep 
ridges of his upland home a man should be sound 
in wind and limbs, and a good shot with the rifle 
as well. Many a glorious fall morning I have 
passed in his pursuit; often, moreover, I have 
slain him in the fading evening as I walked 
homeward through the still dim twilight — for all 
wild game dearly love the gloaming. 

Once on a frosty evening I thus killed one when 



2i6 Ranch Life 

it was so dark that my aim was little but guess- 
work. I was walking back to camp through a 
winding valley, hemmed in by steep cedar- 
crowned walls of clay and rock. All the land- 
scape glimmered white with the new-fallen snow, 
and in the west the sky was still red with the 
wintry sunset. Suddenly a great buck came out 
of a grove of snow-laden cedars, and walked with 
swift strides up to the point of a crag that over- 
looked the valley. There he stood motionless 
while I crouched imseen in the shadow beneath. 
As I fired he reared upright and then plimged 
over the cliff. He fell a hundred feet before 
landing in the bushes, yet he did not gash or mar 
his finely molded head and shapely, massive 
antlers. 

On one of the last days I hunted, in November, 
1887, I killed two black-tail, a doe and a buck, 
with one bullet. They were feeding in a glen 
high up the side of some steep hills, and by a 
careful stalk over rough ground I got within fifty 
yards. Peering over the brink of the cliff-like 
slope up which I had clambered, I saw them 
standing in such a position that the neck of the 
doe covered the buck's shoulder. The chance 
was too tempting to be lost. My bullet broke the 
doe's neck, and of course she fell where she was ; 
but the buck went off, my next two or three shots 
missing him. However, we followed his bloody 



The Ranchman's Rifle 217 

trail, through the high pass he had crossed, down 
a steep slope, and roused him from the brushwood 
in a valley bottom. He soon halted and lay down 
again, making off at a faltering gallop when ap- 
proached, and the third time we came up to him 
he was too weak to rise. He had splendid antlers. 

Sometimes we kill the deer by the aid of 
hounds. Of these we have two at the ranch. 
One is a rough-coated, pure-blood Scotch stag- 
hound, named Rob. The other, Brandy, is a 
track-hound, bell-mouthed, lop-eared, keen -nosed, 
and not particularly fast, but stanch as Death 
himself. He comes of the old Southern strain; 
and, indeed, all the best blooded packs of Ameri- 
can deer-hoimds or fox-hoimds come from what 
was called the Southern Hound in early seven- 
teenth century England. Thus he is kin to 
the hoimds of Bellemeade, wherewith General 
Jackson follows the buck and the gray fox over 
the beautiful fertile hills of middle Tennessee; 
and some of the same blood nms in the veins of 
Mr. Wadsworth's Geneseo hounds, behind which 
I have ridden as they chased the red fox through 
the wooded glens and across the open fields of 
the farms, with their high rail fences. 

T often take Rob out when still-hunting black- 
tail, leading him along in a leash. He is per- 
fectly quiet, not even whimpering; and he is 
certain to overhaul any wotmded deer. A doe or 



2i8 Ranch Life 

a flying buck is borne to the ground with a single 
wrench, and killed out of hand ; but a buck at 
bay is a formidable opponent, and no dog can 
rush in full on the sharp prong points. If the 
two dogs are together, Rob does most of the 
killing; Brandy's only function is to distract the 
attention of an angry buck and then allow Rob 
to pin him. Once a slightly wounded and very 
large black-tail buck, started just at nightfall, ran 
down to the river and made a running bay of 
nearly two hours, Rob steadily at him the whole 
time ; it was too dark for us to shoot, but finally, 
by a lucky throw, one of the men roped the 
quarry. 

Not only will a big black-tail buck beat off a 
dog or a wolf coming at him in front, but he is 
an awkward foe for a man. One of them nearly 
killed a cowboy in my employ. The buck, mor- 
tally wounded, had fallen to the shot, and the 
man rushed up to stick him; then the buck 
revived for a moment, struck down the man, and 
endeavored to gore him, but could not, because 
of the despairing grip with which the man held 
on to his horns. Nevertheless the man, bruised 
and cut by the sharp hoofs, was fast becoming too 
weak to keep his hold, when in the struggle they 
came to the edge of a washout, and fell into it 
some twelve or fifteen feet. This separated them. 
The dying buck was too weak to renew the attack, 



The Ranchman's Rifle 219 

and the man crawled off; but it was months 
before he got over the effects of the encounter. 

Sometimes we kill the white-tail also by fair 
still-hunting, but more often we shoot them on 
the dense river-bottoms by the help of the track- 
hoimd. We put the dogs into the woods with 
perhaps a single horseman to guide them and 
help them rout out the deer, while the rest of us, 
rifle in hand, ride from point to point outside, or 
else watch the passes through which the hunted 
animals are likely to run. It is not a sport of 
which I am very fond, but it is sometimes pleasant 
as a variety. The last time that we tried it I 
killed a buck in the bottom right below our ranch 
house, not half a mile off. The river was low, 
and my post was at its edge, with in front of me 
the broad sandy flat sparsely covered with willow- 
brush. Deer are not much afraid of an ordinary 
noisy hoimd; they will play round in front of 
him, head and flag in air; but with Rob it was 
different. The gray, wolfish beast, swift and 
silent, threw them into a panic of terror, and in 
headlong flight they would seek safety from him 
in the densest thicket. 

On the evening in question one of my cowboys 
went into the brush with the hounds. I had 
hardly ridden to my place and dismounted when 
I heard old Brandy give tongue, the bluffs echoing 
back his long-drawn baying. Immediately after- 



220 Ranch Life 

ward a young buck appeared, coming along the 
sandy river-bed, trotting or cantering; and very 
handsome he looked, stepping with a light, high 
action, his glossy coat glistening, his head thrown 
back, his white flag flaunting. My bullet struck 
him too far back, and he went on, turning into 
the woods. Then the dogs appeared, old Brandy 
running the scent, while the eager gaze-hound 
made wide half -circles round him as he ran ; while 
the cowboy, riding a vicious yellow mustang, gal- 
loped behind, cheering them on. As they struck 
the bloody trail they broke into clamorous yelling, 
and tore at full speed into the woods. A minute 
or two later the sound ceased, and I knew that 
they had run into the quarry. 

Sometimes we use the hounds for other game 
besides deer. A neighboring ranchman had a half- 
breed fox-and-greyhoimd, w^ho, single-handed, ran 
into and throttled a coyote. I have been very 
anxious to try my dogs on a big wolf, intending to 
take along a collie and a half-breed mastiff we 
have to assist at the bay. The mastiff is a good 
fighter, and can kill a wildcat, taking the neces- 
sary pimishment well, as we foimd out when we 
once trapped one of these small lynxes. Shep, 
the collie, is an adept at killing badgers, grabbing 
them from behind and whirling them roimd, 
whereas Brandy always gets his great lop-ears 
bitten. But how they would do with a wolf I 



The Ranchman's Rifle 221 

cannot say; for one of these long-toothed wan- 
derers is usually able to outrun and outfight any 
reasonable number of common hounds, and will 
kill even a big dog very quickly. 

A friend of mine, Mr. Heber Bishop, once 
coursed and killed a wolf with two Scotch deer- 
hounds. After a brisk run the dogs overtook and 
held the quarry, but could not kill it, and were 
being very roughly handled when Mr. Bishop 
came to their assistance. But a ranchman in 
the Indian Territory has a large pack of these 
same Scotch dogs trained especially to himt the 
wolf ; and four or five of the fleet, high-couraged 
animals can not only soon overhaul a wolf, but 
can collar and throttle even the largest. Acci- 
dents to the pack are, of course, frequent. They 
say that the worry is enough to make one's hair 
stand on end. 

Before leaving the subject, it is worth noting 
that we have with us the Canada lynx as well as 
his smaller brother ; and, more singular still, that 
a wolverine, usually found only in the northern 
forests, was killed two winters ago in a big woody 
bottom on the Little Missoun, about forty miles 
north of Medora. The skin and skull were \mmis- 
takable; so there could be no doubt as to the 
beast's identity. 

I have had good sport on the rolling plains, 
near Mandan, in following a scratch pack of four 



222 Ranch Life 

fleet, long-legged dogs. One was a wire-haired 
Scotch deer-hound; his mate was a superb grey- 
hound, the speediest of the set. Both were pos- 
sessed of the dauntless courage peculiar to high- 
bred hunting dogs. The other two were mongrels, 
but, nevertheless, game fighters and swift runners : 
one was a lurcher, and the other a cross between 
a greyhound and a fox-hoiind — the only one of 
the four that ever gave tongue. The two former 
had been used together often, and had slain 
five coyotes, two deer (white-tails), and an 
antelope. 

Both the antelope and the deer they had fairly 
run down, having come up close on them, so that 
they had good send-offs; but there is a wide 
individual variation among game animals as 
regards speed, and those that they caught — at 
any rate the antelope— may not have been as 
fleet as most of their kind. They were especially 
fond of chasing coyotes, and these they easily 
overtook. When at bay the coyotes fought des- 
perately but unavailingly, the two hoimds killing 
their quarry very quickly, one seizing it by the 
throat and the other bv the flanks, and then 
stretching it out in a trice. They occasionally 
received trifling injuries in these contests. The 
animal that gave them most trouble was a badger 
which they once found and only killed after pro- 
longed efforts, its squat, muscular form and tough 



The Ranchman's Rifle 223 

skin making it very difficult for them to get a 
good hold. 

We did not have time to go far from Mandan, 
and so confined our coursing to jack rabbits, 
swifts, and foxes. Of the latter, the great red 
prairie fox, we saw but one, which got up so close 
to the dogs that it had no chance at all, and after 
a fine burst of a few hundred yards was over- 
taken and torn to pieces. The swifts are properly 
called swift foxes, being rather smaller than the 
southern gray fox. Ever since the days of the 
early explorers they have been reputed to possess 
marvelous speed, and their common name of 
"swift," by which they are imiversally known, 
perpetuates the delusion; for a delusion it em- 
phatically is, since they are, if anything, rather 
slow than otherwise. Once, in a snow-storm, I 
started one up imder my horse's feet while riding 
across the prairie, overtook him in a few strides, 
and killed him by a lucky shot with the revolver. 
The speed of the coyote also has been laughably 
exaggerated. Judging by the records of the 
hounds, the antelope is the fastest plains' animal, 
the white-tail deer and the jack rabbit coming 
next; then follow, in order, the coyote, the fox, 
and the swift, which is the slowest of all. Indi- 
viduals vary greatly, however; thus a fast jack 
rabbit might well outrun a slow deer, and of 
course both coyote and fox will outlast the swifter 



224 Ranch Life 

jack rabbits. Several dogs should run together, 
as otherwise a jack or a swift, although over- 
taken, may yet escape by its dexterity in dodging. 
The cactus beds often befriend the hunted animals, 
as the dogs rush heedlessly into them and are 
promptly disabled, while a rabbit or a fox will 
slip through without injury. 

Two or three of us usually went out together. 
Our method of procedure was simple. We scat- 
tered out, dogs and men, and rode in an irregular 
line across the country, beating with care the 
most likely looking places, and following at top 
speed any game that got up. Sometimes a jack 
rabbit, starting well ahead, would run for two 
miles or over, nearly in a straight line, before 
being turned by the leading hoimd; and occa- 
sionally one would even get away altogether. At 
other times it would be overhauled at once and 
killed instantly, or only prolong its life a few 
seconds by its abrupt turns and twists. One 
swift gave us several minutes' chase, although 
never getting thirty rods from the place where it 
started. The little fellow went off as merrily as 
possible, his handsome brush streaming behind 
him, and, though overtaken at once, dodged so 
cleverly that dog after dog shot by him. I do 
not think that a single dog could have killed 
him. 

Coursing is the sport of all sports for ranchmen, 



The Ranchman's Rifle 225 

now that big animals are growing scarce; and 
certainly there can be no healthier or more 
exciting pastime than that of following game 
with horse and hound over the great Western 
plains. 



15 



CHAPTER X. 

THE WAPITI, OR ROUND-HORNED ELK. 

THIS stately and splendid deer, the lordliest 
of its kind throughout the world, is now 
fast vanishing. In our own neighborhood 
it is already almost a thing of the past. But a 
small band yet lingers round a great tract of 
prairie and Bad Lands some thirty-five miles 
from the ranch house. 

One fall I killed a good bull out of the lot. I 
was hiinting on horseback, and roused the elk 
out of a deep, narrow coulee, heavily timbered, 
where he was lying by himself. He went straight 
up the steep side directly opposite to where I 
stood, for I had leaped off my horse when I 
heard the crash of the underbrush. When on a 
level with me, he halted and turned half round 
to gaze at me across the ravine, and then I shot 
him. 

The next season, when we were sorely in need 
of meat for smoking and drying, we went 
after these elk again. At the time most of the 
ponies were off on one of the roimd-ups, which 
indeed I had myself just left. However, my two 
hunting-horses, Manitou and Sorrel Joe, were at 
home. The former I rode myself, and on the 

226 



The Wapiti 227 

latter I mounted one of my men who was a par- 
ticularly good hand at finding and following game. 
With much difficulty we got together a scrub 
wagon team of four as unkempt, dejected, and 
vicious-looking broncos as ever stuck fast in a 
quicksand or balked in pulling up a steep pitch. 
Their driver was a crack whip, and their load 
light, consisting of little but the tent and the 
bedding; so we got out to the hiinting-groimd 
and back in safety; but as the river was high 
and the horses were weak, we came within an ace 
of being swamped at one crossing, and the country 
was so very rough that we were only able to get 
the wagon up the worst pitch by hauling from the 
saddle with the riding-animals. 

We camped by an excellent spring of cold, clear 
water — not a common luxury in the Bad Lands. 
We pitched the tent beside it, getting enough 
timber from a grove of ash to make a large fire, 
which again is an appreciated blessing on the 
plains of the West, where we often need to carry 
along with us the wood for cooking our supper 
and breakfast, and sometimes actually have to 
dig up our fuel, making the fire of sage-brush 
roots, eked out with buffalo chips. Though the 
days were still warm, the nights were frosty. 
Our camp was in a deep valley, bounded by steep 
hills with sloping, grassy sides, one of them 
marked by a peculiar shelf of rock. The coimtry 



228 Ranch Life 

for miles was of this same character, much broken, 
but everywhere passable for horsemen, and with 
the hills roimded and grassy, except now and 
then for a chain of red scoria buttes or an isolated 
sugar-loaf cone of gray and brown clay. The 
first day we spent in trying to find the probable 
locality of our game; and after beating pretty 
thoroughly over the smoother country, toward 
nightfall we foiind quite fresh elk tracks leading 
into a stretch of very rough and broken land about 
ten miles from camp. 

We started next morning before the gray was 
relieved by the first faint flush of pink, and 
reached the broken coiintry soon after sunrise. 
Here we dismounted and picketed our horses, as 
the ground we were to hunt through was very 
rough. Two or three hours passed before we 
came upon fresh signs of elk. Then we found 
the trails that two, from the size presumably 
cows, had made the preceding night, and started 
to follow them, carefully and noiselessly, my com- 
panion taking one side of the valley in which 
we were and I the other. The tracks led into 
one of the wildest and most desolate parts of the 
Bad Lands, It was now the heat of the day, the 
brazen sun shining out of a cloudless sky, and not 
the least breeze stirring. At the bottom of the 
valley, in the deep, narrow bed of the winding 
water-course, lay a few tepid little pools, almost 



The Wapiti 229 

dried up. Thick groves of stiinted cedars stood 
here and there in the glen-like pockets of the high 
buttes, the peaks and sides of which were bare, 
and only their lower, terrace-like ledges thinly- 
clad with coarse, withered grass and sprawling 
sage-brush ; the parched hill-sides were riven by 
deep, twisted gorges, with brushwood in the 
bottoms; and the cliffs of coarse clay were cleft 
and seamed by sheer-sided, canyon-like gullies. 
In the narrow ravines, closed in by barren, sun- 
baked walls, the hot air stood still and sultry; 
the only living beings were the rattlesnakes, and 
of these I have never elsewhere seen so many. 
Some basked in the sun, stretched out at their 
ugly length of mottled brown and yellow ; others 
lay half imder stones or twined in the roots of 
the sage-brush, and looked straight at me with 
that strange, sullen, evil gaze, never shifting or 
mo\4ng, that is the property only of serpents and 
of certain men; while one or two coiled and 
rattled menacingly as I stepped near. 

Yet, though we walked as quietly as we could, 
the game must have heard or smelt us ; for after 
a mile's painstaking search we came to a dense 
thicket in which were two beds, evidently but 
just left, for the twigs and bent grass-blades were 
still slowly rising from the ground to which the 
bodies of the elk had pressed them. The long, 
clean hoof-prints told us that the quarry had 



230 Ranch Life 

started off at a swinging trot. We followed at 
once, and it was wonderful to see how such large, 
heavy beasts had gone up the steepest hill-sides 
without altering their swift and easy gait, and had 
plunged unhesitatingly over nearly sheer cliffs 
down which we had to clamber with careful 
slowness. 

They left the strip of rugged Bad Lands and 
went on into the smoother country beyond, luckily 
passing quite close to where our horses were 
picketed. We thought it likely that they would 
halt in some heavily timbered coulees six or seven 
miles off ; and as there was no need of hurry, we 
took limch and then began following them up — 
an easy feat, as their hoofs had sunk deep into 
the soft soil, the prints of the dew-claws showing 
now and then. At first we rode, but soon dis- 
mounted, and led our horses. 

We foxmd the elk almost as soon as we struck 
the border of the ground we had marked as their 
probable halting-place. Our horses were imshod, 
and made but little noise ; and coming to a wide, 
long coulee filled with tall trees and brushwood, 
we as usual separated, I going down one side and 
my companion the other. When nearly half-way 
down he suddenly whistled sharply, and I of 
course at once stood still, with my rifle at the 
ready. Nothing moved, and I glanced at him. 
He had squatted down and was gazing earnestly 



The Wapiti 231 

over into the dense laurel on my side of the 
coulee. In a minute he shouted that he saw a 
red patch in the brush which he thought must be 
the elk, and that it was right between him and 
myself. Elk will sometimes lie as closely as 
rabbits, even when not in very good cover; still 
I was a little surprised at these not breaking out 
when they heard human voices. However, there 
they stayed ; and I waited several minutes in vain 
for them to move. From where I stood it was 
impossible to see them, and I was fearful that 
they might go off down the valley and so offer 
me a very poor shot. Meanwhile, Manitou, who 
is not an emotional horse, and is moreover blessed 
with a large appetite, was feeding greedily, rattling 
his bridle-chains at every mouthful ; and I thought 
that he would act as a guard to keep the elk where 
they were until I shifted my position. So I slipped 
back, and ran swiftly round the head of the coulee 
to where my companion was still sitting. He 
pointed me out the patch of red in the bushes, not 
sixty yards distant, and I fired into it without 
delay, by good luck breaking the neck of a cow 
elk, when immediately another one rose up from 
beside it and made off. I had five shots at her 
as she ascended the hill-side and the gentle slope 
beyond; and two of my bullets struck her close 
together in the flank, ranging forward — a very 
fatal shot. She was evidently mortally hit, and 



232 Ranch Life 

just as she reached the top of the divide she 
stopped, reeled, and fell over, dead. 

We were much pleased with our luck, as it 
secured us an ample stock of needed fresh meat; 
and the two elk lay very handily, so that on the 
following day we were able to stop for them with 
the wagon on our way homeward, putting them 
in bodily, and leaving only the entrails for the 
vultures that were already soaring in great circles 
over the carcasses.* 

Much the finest elk antlers I ever got, as a 
trophy of my own rifle, were from a mighty bull 
that I killed far to the west of my ranch, in the 
eastern chains of the Rockies. I shot him early 
one morning, while still-hunting through the open 
glades of a great pine forest, where the frosty 
dew was still heavy on the grass. We had lis- 
tened to him and his fellows challenging each 
other all night long. Near by the call of the bulls 

^No naturalist ever described the way vultures gather with 
more scientific accuracy than Longfellow: 

"Never stoops the soaring vultxire 

On his quarry in the desert, 

On the sick or wounded bison, 

But another vulture, watching 

From his high aerial lookout, 

Sees the downward plunge, and follows; 

And a third pursues the second, 

Coming from the invisible ether. 

First a speck, and then a vulture, 

Till the air is dark with pinions." 



The Wapiti 233 

in the rutting season — their "whistling," as the 
frontiersmen term it — sounds harsh and grating; 
but heard in the depths of their own mountain 
fastnesses, ringing through the frosty night, and 
echoing across the ravines and under the silent 
archways of the pines, it has a grand, musical 
beauty of its owtl that makes it, to me, one of 
the most attractive soimds in nature. 

At this season the bulls fight most desperately, 
and their combats are far more often attended 
with fatal results than is the case with deer. In 
the grove back of my ranch house, when we first 
took possession, we found the skulls of two elk 
with interlocked antlers ; one was a royal, the 
other had fourteen points. Theirs had been a 
duel to the death. 

In hunting, whether on the prairie or in the 
deep woods, a man ought to pay great heed to 
his surroundings, so as not to get lost. To an old 
hand, getting lost is not so very serious ; because, 
if he has his rifle and some matches, and does not 
lose his head, the worst that can happen to him 
is having to suffer some temporary discomfort. 
But a novice is in imminent danger of losing his 
w*its, and therefore his life. To a man totally 
imaccustomed to it the sense of utter loneliness is 
absolutely appalling: the feeling of being lost in 
the wilderness seems to drive him into a state of 
panic terror that is frightful to behold, and that 



234 Ranch Life 

in the end renders him bereft of reason. When 
he reahzes that he is lost he often will begin to 
travel very fast, and finally run until he falls 
exhausted — only to rise again and repeat the 
process when he has recovered his strength. If 
not found in three or four days, he is very apt to 
become crazy ; he w411 then flee from the rescuers, 
and must be pursued and captured as if he were a 
wild animal. 

Since 1884, when I went to the Big Horn 
Mountains, I have killed no grizzlies. There are 
some still left in our neighborhood, but they are 
very shy, and live in such inaccessible places, 
that, though I have twice devoted several days 
solely to hvinting them, I was unsuccessful each 
time. A year ago, however, two cowboys found 
a bear in the open, and after the expenditure 
of a great number of cartridges killed it with 
their revolvers, the bear charging gamely to the 
last. 

But this feat sinks into insignificance when 
compared with the deed of General W. H. Jack- 
son, of Bellemeade, Tennessee, who is probably 
the only man living who ever, single-handed, 
killed a grizzly bear with a cavalry saber. It 
was many years ago, when he was a young officer 
in the United States service. He was with a 
column of eight companies of moimted infantry 
under the command of Colonel Andrew Porter, 



The Wapiti 235 

when by accident a bear was roused and lum- 
bered off in front of them. Putting spurs to his 
thoroughbred, he followed the bear, and killed it 
with the saber, in sight of the whole command. 



CHAPTER XL 

THE BIG-HORN SHEEP. 

IT has happened that I have generally hunted 
big-horn during weather of arctic severity; 
so that in my mind this great sheep is 
inseparably associated with snow-clad, desolate 
wastes, ice-coated crags, and the bitter cold of a 
northern winter; whereas the sight of a prong- 
buck, the game that we usually himt early in the 
season, always recalls to me the endless green of 
the midsummer prairies as they shimmer in the 
sunlight. 

Yet in reality the big-horn is by no means 
confined to any one climatic zone. Along the 
interminable mountain chains of the Great Divide 
it ranges south to the hot, dry table-lands of 
middle Mexico, as well as far to the northward 
of the Canadian boundary, among the towering 
and tremendous peaks where the glaciers are fed 
from fields of everlasting snow. There exists no 
animal more handy, nor any better fitted to 
grapple with the extremes of heat and cold. 
Droughts, scanty pasturage, or deep snows make 
it shift its ground, but never mere variation of 
temperature. The lofty mountains form its favo- 
rite abode, but it is almost equally at home in 

236 



The Big-Horn Sheep 237 

any large tract of very rough and broken ground. 
It is by no means an exclusively alpine animal, 
like the white goat. It is not only foimd through- 
out the main chains of the Rockies, as well as on 
the Sierras of the south and the coast ranges of 
western Oregon, Washington, and British Colum- 
bia, but it also exists to the east among the 
clusters of high hills and the stretches of barren 
Bad Lands that break the monotonous level of 
the great plains. 

Throughout most of its range the big-horn is a 
partly migratory beast. In the summer it seeks 
the highest mountains, often passing above 
timber-line; and when the fall snows deepen it 
comes down to the lower spurs or foot-hills, or 
may even travel some distance southward. If 
there is a large tract of Bad Lands near the 
mountains, sheep may be plentiful in them 
throughout the severe weather, while in the 
summer not a single individual will be found in 
its winter haimts, all having then retired to the 
high peaks. 

Sometimes big-horn wander widely for reasons 
unconnected with the weather: all of those in a 
district may suddenly leave it and perhaps not 
return for several years. Such is often the result 
of a district being settled, or being exposed to 
incessant himting. After a certain number of 
sheep have been killed the remainder may all 



238 Ranch Life 

disappear, possibly one or two small bands only- 
staying behind ; but it is quite likely that two or 
three years later the bulk of the vanished host 
will come back again. 

But where the region that they inhabit is cut 
off from the mountains by settled districts, or 
by great stretches of plain and prairie, then the 
sheep that dwell therein can make no such 
migrations. Thus they live all the year roimd in 
the Little Missouri Bad Lands; and though the 
different bands wander away and to and fro for 
scores of miles, especially in the fall, — for big-horn 
are far more restless than deer, — yet they do not 
shift their positions much on account of the 
season, and are often found in precisely the same 
places both summer and winter. They thus bear 
with indifference exposure to the extremes of heat 
and cold in a climate where the yearly variation 
reaches the utmost possible limit, the thermom- 
eter sometimes covering a range of a hundred and 
seventy degrees in the course of twelve months. 
There are few spots on earth much hotter than 
these Bad Lands during a spell of fierce summer 
weather, and, imlike the deer, the sheep cannot 
seek the shade of the dense thickets. In the 
glare of midday the naked angular hills yield no 
shelter whatever; the barren ravines between 
them turn into ovens beneath the brazen sun. 
The still, lifeless, burning air stifles those who 



The Big-Horn Sheep 239 

breathe it, while the parched and heat-cracked 
canyon walls are intolerable to the touch. 

But though the mountain sheep can stand this, 
and in fact do so with even less protection than 
the deer, yet they certainly dislike it more than 
do the latter. If mountains are near, they go up 
them far sooner and far higher than the deer. 
On the other hand, they bear the winter blizzards 
much better, caring less for shelter, and keeping 
their strength pretty well. Ordinarily when in 
the Bad Lands they do not shift their ground 
save to get on the lee side of the cliffs, though the 
deep snows of course drive them from the moim- 
tains. A very heavy fall of snow, if they are high 
up on the hills, occasionally forces a band to enter 
the evergreen woods and make a regular yard, as 
deer do, beneath the overhanging cover-giving 
branches ; then they subsist on the scanty browse 
until they can get back to pasture lands. But 
this is rare. Generally they stay in the open, and 
bid defiance to the elements ; yet, like other game, 
they often seem to have the knack of foretelling 
any storm or cold spell of unusual severity and 
length. On the eve of such a storm they fre- 
quently retreat to some secure haven of refuge. 
This may be a nook or cranny in the rocks, or 
merely a slight hollow to leeward of a little grove 
of stunted pines; and there the band may have 
to stay without food for several days, imtil the 



240 Ranch Life 

storm is over. Occasionally they succumb to the 
deep snow; but if they have any kind of chance 
for their lives, this happens less often than with 
either deer or antelope. 

The big-horn, or cimarron sheep, as the Mexi- 
cans call it, is the sole American representative of 
the different kinds of mountain sheep that are 
found in the Old World. It is fourfold the weight 
of the Mediterranean moufflon. Its nearest rela- 
tive, from which it is with difficulty distinguished, 
is the huge argali, three or four varieties — some 
say species — of which are to be foimd in the high 
lands of central Asia. The American and Asiatic 
animals seem to grade into one another as regards 
size; the north Asiatic argali is said to be no 
larger than the big-horn, but the giant Himalayan 
sheep, or nyan, averages heavier, both in body 
and horns, and especially in length of legs. The 
horns of the argali have more outward twist. 
The largest big-horn of which I have ever been 
able to get authentic record was one killed in 
Montana by a ranch friend of mine, and carefully 
weighed and measured at the time. iVt the 
shoulder he stood just three feet eight inches ; he 
weighed very nearly four hundred pounds; and 
his single unbroken horn was in girth nineteen 
inches, and in length along the curve forty-two. 
But such a ram is a giant. The largest I have 
myself shot I had no means of weighing: it was 



The Big-Horn Sheep 241 

just after the rutting season, and he was as gaunt 
as a greyhound. At the shoulder he stood three 
feet five inches; and his horns, which were thick 
for their length, were in girth sixteen and a half 
inches, and in length thirty. The nyan of Thibet, 
on the other hand, stands four feet high ; and 
exceptional rams have horns twenty-three inches 
round the base and upward of fifty in length, 
while the average full-grown one will perhaps 
have them seventeen inches by thirty-eight. The 
nyan thus certainly stands before the big-horn, 
although even among full-grown animals many 
heads of the latter would be above the average of 
the former. The difference in the habits of the 
two animals is very marked, for according to 
English sportsmen the nyan keeps exclusively to 
the high, open plains, or barren, gently sloping 
hills; whereas the big-horn, like the Old World 
ibex, is a beast of the crags and precipices, and 
though sometimes venturing into the level coun- 
try, yet at the first alarm it invariably dashes for 
the broken ground. 

Our American mountain sheep usually go in 
bands of from fifteen to thirty individuals, occa- 
sionally of many more; while often small parties 
of two or three will stay by themselves. In the 
winter, or sometimes not imtil the early spring, 
the old rams separate. The oldest and finest are 
often foiind entirely alone, retiring to the most 
16 



242 Ranch Life 

inaccessible solitudes; the younger ones keep in 
little flocks of perhaps half a dozen or so. The 
main band then consists only of the ewes, the 
yearlings, and now and then a two-year-old ; and 
this also is soon broken up, leaving merely the 
yearlings and the barren ewes, for about the 
middle of May the ewes that are heavy with 
yoimg leave the rest, each by herself. Like the 
old rams, they now seek the most inaccessible 
and far-off places — ^high up the mountains, if 
possible; otherwise, in the barren and unfre- 
quented portions of the Bad Lands, where the 
steep hills and abrupt valleys are twisted into a 
mere tangle of precipitous crests and canyons. 
Here the ewe makes her lying-in bed — oval in 
shape, like that of a prong-horn or black-tail doe, 
but made by pawing out, or perhaps merely 
wearing out, a slight hollow in the bare soil; 
whereas the doe crushes down with her weight 
the long grass of the prairie or thicket. This bed 
is usually made on the ledge of a cliff, on the side 
where there is most shelter from the prevailing 
winds ; perhaps it is beneath a great rock or clay 
boulder, with not so much as a blade of grass 
around, or it may be partly screened by a few 
wind-beaten sage-bushes. Generally only one, 
but sometimes two, young are brought forth at 
a birth. The young lamb matches his surround- 
ings wonderfully in color, and the ewe is very 



The Big-Horn Sheep 243 

careful in going to him to be sure that she is 
unobserved. For the first day or two the lamb 
trusts for his safety solely to not being seen by 
the beasts and birds of prey. He crouches fiat 
down, like an antelope fawn, and it is next to 
impossible for human eyes to discover him save 
by accident. Once only I stumbled across a 
newly bom lamb. It was about the first of June, 
and I found him lying by the bed of the mother 
as I was going along a ledge, scantily covered with 
sage-brush, in the heart of some high, wild hills, 
about fifteen miles from my ranch. The little 
fellow was too yoiing to show much alarm when 
I handled and petted him and with much diffi- 
culty persuaded him to stand up on his helplessly 
weak and awkward little legs. The mother was 
about two himdred yards distant, and was greatly 
frightened when I drew near her offspring; she 
hung about in the distance for a short time and 
then dashed off. However, she must have re- 
turned when I left; for two or three days later, 
when from curiosity I came back, the little fellow 
was gone. 

When the yoimg are able to clamber about for 
short distances almost as well as the old, then 
the nursing ewes and their lambs rejoin the band, 
some time in July. The band now keeps in the 
neighborhood of water and where the feed is 
good — comparatively good, at least, for the scanty 



244 Ranch Life 

pasturage that grows on the mountains and barren 
hills haunted by the sheep would hardly please 
more luxury-loving animals. The flocks of ewes 
and lambs are at this time quite easily discovered, 
but of course no man but a game butcher would 
dream of molesting them. In September the 
young rams begin to join them, and soon after- 
ward the old patriarchs likewise come down from 
their remote fastnesses. 

The rams now fight desperately among them- 
selves for the possession of the ewes, rushing 
together with a shock that would shatter their 
skulls were they less strong; while the battered 
horns, with splintered ends, bear witness to the 
violence of the contests. These contests are free 
from one danger, however; the horns do not get 
interlocked, and thus cause the death of both 
combatants. This is not only a common accident 
among deer and elk, but it even happens to 
antelope; I knew of one instance where two 
prong-horn bucks, who had evidently been 
battling for a doe, were found dead, side by 
side, partly eaten by the coyotes. The right 
horn of one and the left horn of the other had 
become locked together so firmly, thanks to the 
prong and the hook at the end, that they could 
not be drawn apart, and the two beasts had died 
miserably in consequence. Each herd has some 
acknowledged master ram, but he may tolerate 



The Big-Horn Sheep 245 

the presence of three or four others of lesser 
degree, together with the ewes, lambs, and year- 
lings that go to make up the rest of the flock; 
or else, if a cross old fellow, the master ram may 
turn out all the others, or may content himself 
with a little bunch of merely three or four ewes. 
So that even at this season several young rams 
may be found by themselves; or a morose old 
veteran, time-worn and battle-scarred, may keep 
entirely alone. As soon as the rutting season is 
over many of these exiles rejoin the band; and 
at this time, when the rams are of course in very 
poor condition, they are all apt to come down on 
the levels more boldly than at any other season, 
to get at the good grass, although even now 
rarely venturing very far from the hills. While 
thus on the edges of the plains, their natural 
wariness seems to increase tenfold. 

But at all times their habits are very variable; 
for they are restless, wandering beasts, with some- 
thing whimsical in their tempers, and given at 
times to queer freaks. If the fit seize them, and 
especially if they have been alarmed or annoyed, 
they may at any time leave their accustomed 
dwelling-places, or act in a manner absolutely 
contrary to their usual conduct. About noon one 
hot midsummer day, three great rams crossed the 
river just below our ranch, stopping to drink, and 
spending some time on the sand-bars, occasionally 



246 Ranch Life 

playfully butting at each other. They trotted off 
before they could be stalked. To get down to 
the river they had to pass over a level plain half 
a mile wide ; and once across, they went through 
a dense wood choked with underbrush for nearly 
half a mile more before again coming to the steep 
bluffs. On another occasion, in the rutting 
season, one of my cowboys encountered a moun- 
tain-ram crossing a broad, level river-bottom at 
midday. Occasionally a ram will join a flock of 
ewes, or a ewe and a yearling, in the spring. 
Two or three times I have knowni them to come 
boldly up to the bluffs that overlook and skirt a 
little frontier town, and there to stay grazing or 
resting for several hours ; but they always made 
off in plenty of time to avoid the himters who 
finally went after them. Once I shot one within 
a few hiindred yards of my ranch house. I was 
returning home, weary and unsuccessful, after a 
long day's tramp over hills where black-tail 
usually were common. When nearly home I 
struck into a well-beaten cattle-trail, leading 
down a deep, narrow ravine which cleft in two 
a knot of jagged hills ; it was a favorite range for 
our horses, and so was frequently ridden over by 
the cowboys. On turning round a comer of the 
ravine, a sudden snort to one side and above me 
made me hastily look up, shifting my rifle from 
my shoulder. On my right the sheer wall of clay 



The Big-Horn Sheep 247 

rose up without a break for perhaps two hundred 
feet or so, its thin, notched crest showing against 
the sky-line as sharply as if cut with a knife; 
and on a little jutting pinnacle was perched a 
mountain sheep, its four hoofs all together on a 
space no larger than the palms of a man's hands. 
It was facing me and staring down at me, so that 
the bullet went right into its chest, splitting its 
heart fairly open. Yet it did not fall forward 
over the cliff, but wheeled on its haunches and 
went along the crest at a mad, plunging gallop, 
finally crossing out of sight. Almost as soon as 
it disappeared a column of dust rose from the 
other side of the ridge, making me think that it 
had fallen some distance, striking hard on the 
dry clay. The guess was a good one, and when, 
after a long circle and some climbing, I reached 
the spot, I foimd a fine young barren ewe lying 
dead at the foot of a high cut bank. 

But all such instances as these are wholly excep- 
tional, and are chiefly interesting as showing that 
mountain sheep act more erratically and less 
according to rule than do most other kinds of 
game. They seem to have fits of restless way- 
wardness, or even of panic curiosity ; and so at 
times wander into unlooked-for places, or betray 
a sudden heedlessness of dangers against which 
they on ordinary occasions carefully guard. This 
last freak, however, is generally shown only in 



248 Ranch Life 

very wild localities or among young animals. 
Where hunters are scarce or almost imknowni, all 
■wild animals are very bold. I have seen deer in 
remote forests, and even in little-hiinted localities 
near my ranch, so tame that they would stand 
looking at the hunter within fifty yards for 
several minutes before taking flight. Mountain 
sheep under similar circumstances show a lordly 
disregard for the human intruder, leaving his 
presence at a leisurely gait, in strong contrast to 
the mad gallop of their more sophisticated 
brethren when alarmed. 

In fact, much of the wariness among beasts of 
chase, as well as much of the courage shown by 
the more ferocious, depends upon the degree in 
which they have been harried by himters, al- 
though much also depends upon the character of 
the species. European game is thus generally 
wilder than American ; but no animal could be 
more difficult to approach than a Maine moose. 
The deer of the Adirondacks and Alleghanies are 
almost as wary, and in those parts of the Rockies 
where they have been much molested, big-honi 
are as shy as the chamois of the Alps, or the ibex 
of the Pyrenees. So the sloth bear and leopard 
of India are now much more vicious and dangerous 
to man than are the black bear and cougar of the 
United States, simply because of the different race 
of human beings by whom they are surrounded. 



The Big-Horn Sheep 249 

No animal seems to have been more changed 
by domestication than the sheep. The timid, 
helpless, fleecy idiot of the folds, the most foolish 
of all tame animals, has hardly a trait in common 
with his self-reliant wild relative who combines 
the horns of a sheep with the hide of a deer, 
whose home is in the rocks and the mountains, 
and who is so abiindantly able to take care of 
himself. Wild sheep are as good mountaineers 
as wild goats, or as mountain antelopes, and are 
to the full as wary and intelligent. 

A very short experience with the rifle-bearing 
portion of mankind changes the big-horn into a 
quarry whose successful chase taxes to the utmost 
the skill alike of still-hunter and of mountaineer. 
A solitary old ram seems to be ever on the watch. 
His favorite resting-place is a shelf or terrace-end 
high up on some cliff, from whence he can see far 
and wide over the country round about. The 
least soimd — the rattle of a loose stone, a cough, 
even a heavy footfall on hard earth — attracts his 
attention, making him at once clamber up on 
some peak to try for a glimpse of the danger. 
His eyes catch the slightest movement. His nose 
is as keen as an elk's, and gives him surer warning 
than any other sense; the slightest taint in the 
air produces immediate flight in the direction 
away from the danger. But there is one com- 
pensation, from the hunter's standpoint, for his 



250 Ranch Life 

wonderfully developed smelling powers; he lives 
in such very broken country that the currents of 
air often go over his head, so that it is at times 
possible to hunt him almost dov^TL wind. 

A band of sheep is, if anything, even more 
difficult to approach than is a single ram; but, 
on the other hand, it is far easier to get on the 
track of and to find out, as there are always some 
young members guilty of indiscretions. All of 
the flock are ever on the lookout. While the 
others are grazing there is always at least one 
with its head up; and occasionally a particu- 
larly watchful ewe will jiunp up on some boulder, 
or at least stand with her fore-legs against its 
side, so as to get a wider view. Any tmexplained 
sight or sound is announced to the rest of the 
herd by a kind of hissing snort, or sometimes by 
a stamp of the forefoot on the ground. If the 
intruder is either smelt or seen, the whole herd 
instantly break into the strong but not particu- 
larly swift gallop which distinguishes the species, 
and go straight away from the danger toward the 
roughest ground that they can reach. If, how- 
ever, only alarmed by a sound, or if the suspicious 
object is some distance off, the animals often nm 
together into a bunch and stand gazing in its 
direction for a few seconds prior to making off. 
Among cliffs and precipices the echoes are so con- 
fusing that if the lumter keeps out of sight the 



The Big-Horn Sheep 251 

herd occasionally become utterly bewildered by 
the firing, and, as a result, spend several fatal 
minutes in a futile running to and fro, uncertain 
what course will take them out of danger. One 
day my cousin. West Roosevelt, after a long and 
careful stalk, got close up to three sheep in a very 
deep and narrow ravine ; and although, owing to 
their being almost underneath him, he at first 
overshot, yet all three of the startled and panic- 
struck animals were killed before they recovered 
their wats sufficiently to run out of range. 

But a chance like this may not happen once 
in a htmter's lifetime. Of all American game, 
this is the one in whose pursuit the successful 
hunter needs to show most skill, hardihood, and 
resolution. On ordinar}^ occasions a big-horn, 
when menaced by danger, flees beyond its reach 
with instant decision and headlong speed, dis- 
appearing with incredible rapidity over ground 
where it needs an expert cragsman to so much as 
follow at a walk. Its wonderful feats of climbing 
have, as w4th the chamois and ibex of the Old 
World, given rise to many fables, the most wide- 
spread being the belief that the rams, in plunging 
doA^TL precipices, alight on their horns. So the 
chamois was said to hang over ledges by means 
of its short, hooked horns, and when cornered on 
the edge of a sheer precipice, where there was no 
escape from the hunter, of its own accord to 



252 Ranch Life 

thrust its body against his outstretched knife — as 
we read and see pictured in the German hunting- 
books of two or three centuries ago, such as the 
quaint old "Adeliche Weidwerke." 

The mountain sheep of America, when the 
choice is open to them, actually seem to prefer 
regions as wild and i"ugged as they are sterile. 
The tufts of grass between the rocks, the scanty 
blades that grow on the clay buttes, suffice for 
their wants, and the amoimt of climbing neces- 
sary to get at them is literally a matter of indif- 
ference to beasts whose muscles are like whipcord 
and whose tendons are like steel. A big-horn is 
a marvelous leaper, perhaps even better when the 
jump is perpendicular than when it is horizontal. 
His poise is perfect; his eye and foot work 
together with unerring accuracy. One will un- 
hesitatingly boimd or drop a dozen feet on to a 
little rock pinnacle where there is scarce a hand's 
breadth on which to stand. The presence of the 
tiniest cracks in the otherwise smooth surface of 
a sheer rock wall enables a mountain sheep to go 
up it with ease. The proud, lordly bearing of an 
old ram makes him look exactly what he is, one 
of the noblest of game animals; his port is the 
same whether at rest or in motion. Except when 
very badly frightened, his movements are all made 
with a certain self-confident absence of hurry, as 
if he were conscious of a vast reserve power of 



The Big-Horn Sheep 253 

strength and activity on which to draw at need. 
As a mountaineer he is the embodiment of elastic, 
sinewy strength and self-command, rather than 
of mere nervous agility. He hardly ever makes 
a mistake, even when rushing at speed over the 
slippery, ice-coated crags in winter. 

The most difficult of all climbing is to go over 
rocks when the ice has filled up all the chinks and 
crannies, and the flat slabs are glassy in their 
hard smoothness. A black-tail buck is no mean 
climber; yet imder such circumstances I have 
seen one lose his footing and tumble head over 
heels, scraping great handfuls of hair off his hide; 
but I have never known a big-horn to make a 
misstep. This is undoubtedly largely owing to 
the difference between the two animals in the 
structure of their feet. A sheep's hoof is an 
elastic pad, only the rims and the toe-points being 
hard, and it thus gets a good grip on the slightest 
projection, or on any little roughness in the rock. 
The tracks are very different from deer tracks, 
being nearly square in form, instead of heart- 
shaped, the prints of the toes rather deep and 
wide apart, even when the animal has been 
walking. 

A band of sheep will often seem to court certain 
death by plunging off the brink of what looks like 
a perpendicular cliff, where there is not a ledge or 
a crack yielding foothold. In such cases, if the 



254 Ranch Life 

cliff is high, it will be found on examination that 
it is not quite perpendicular, and that the sheep, 
in making the fearful descent, from time to time 
touch or strike the cliff with their hoofs, thus 
going down in long bounds, keeping their poise 
all the time. The final bound is often made 
almost head first, as if they were diving. 

Narrow ledges, overlooking an abyss the fathom- 
less depths of w^hich would make even a trained 
cragsman giddy, are very favorite resorts. So are 
the crests of the ridges themselves. If in any patch 
of Bad Lands there is an unusually high chain of 
steep, bare clay buttes, mountain sheep are sure 
to select their tops as a regular parade-ground. 
After a rain the clay takes their hoof-prints as 
clearly as if it were sealing-wax, and all along the 
top of the crest the}^ beat out a regular walk from 
one end to the other, with occasional little side- 
paths leading out to some overhanging shoulder 
or jutting spur, from whence there is a good view 
of the surrounding country. 

Generally the band is led by a ewe; but in a 
case of immediate and pressing danger the ram 
assumes the head-ship. Aside from man, moim- 
tain sheep have fewer foes than most other game. 
Bears are too clumsy to catch them; and lynx 
and fox, inveterate enemies of fawns, rarely get 
up to the high, breezy nurseries of the yoimg 
lambs. Wolves and cougars, however, harass 



The Big-Horn Sheep 255 

them greatly. A wolf will not attack an old ram 
if he can help it, but sneaks after the ewes and 
lambs, waiting imtil they get on somewhat level 
ground, and then running one down by sheer 
speed before it can take refuge among the secure 
fastnesses of the precipices. 

The cougar relies on stealth, not on speed, and 
gets his game either by fair stalking or else by 
lying in wait. Sometimes he can creep up to a 
band while they are taking their siesta ; but gen- 
erally they keep too sharp a lookout, and he has 
to approach them while they are feeding, or when 
they have come down to drink. Some fifteen 
miles from my ranch is a tract of very rough 
country, the sides of the hills falling off into 
precipices or into dark, cedar-clad gorges. This 
was a favorite resort of motmtain sheep ; but one 
spring a couple of cougars took up their abode in 
the neighborhood, and soon killed several of the 
sheep and drove the others away. Judging by 
the tracks and by the position of the carcasses, 
they must have done the killing in the morning 
and evening, creeping up to the doomed animals 
as they fed on the lower slopes, or lurking round 
the spring-holes and little alkali pools where they 
drank. The great war eagle is one of the worst 
enemies of the young lambs. 

In the rutting season a ram will make a good 
fight if he has any chance at all, and at that time 



256 Ranch Life 

is very bold and pugnacious. If followed by a 
dog he will frequently decline to run, turning to 
bay at once. One hunter whom I knew killed 
several in this way by the aid of a collie. Of 
course it cannot be done when once the sheep 
have begun to realize that the dog is merely an 
ally of the man, for they then look out for the 
latter. 

Sheep are easily tamed, if taken young, and 
make amusing pets. A friend in Helena, Mon- 
tana, once owned a tame ram. When yoimg he 
was a great favorite. He was an inquisitive, mis- 
chievous creature, of marvelous activity. It was 
impossible to keep him out of the garden. A 
single hop would carr>^ him over the high fence; 
if an inmate of the house came to the rescue, 
another hop carried the intruder once more into 
outside safety, and a third took him back again 
the second the rescuer had turned aroimd. When- 
ever he got the chance he would pull down the 
clothes that had been hung up to dry. When he 
could get inside the house he was fond of walking 
on the mantelpiece. He was the terror of the 
Chinese cook, whom he soon discovered to be 
afraid of him, and would lie in wait outside the 
kitchen door so as to butt him when he appeared. 
This was at first done in mere playfulness; but 
as he grew older he became morose and quarrel- 
some, and had to be disposed of. 



The Big-Horn Sheep 257 

It is impossible to hunt big-horn successfully 
without some knowledge of their habits They 
go down to drink in the very late evening, or 
sometimes in the gray of the morning; when the 
moon is full they may not go to the water imtil 
long after nightfall. Generally they drink later 
than any other game; but all game vary their 
habits now and then in this regard. The prong- 
buck, though diurnal, sometimes comes to a 
watering-hole during the night ; and I have once 
or twice seen both deer and sheep drinking at 
midday. 

In ordinary weather they begin to feed early 
in the morning, and when the sim has risen some 
little distance above the horizon they start to 
graze their way slowly up to the high spur or 
ridge crest where they intend to lie during the 
day. Here they stay until well on in the after- 
noon, and then again descend to their feeding- 
grounds on the lower slopes. In very cold 
weather, however, they are apt to be foimd 
grazing at midday. A raging snow blizzard may 
keep them lying close imder cover for three days 
at a time : they naturally get ravenous, and when 
there is a lull, or especially if it is succeeded by 
a short spell of good weather, they come hastily 
out to feed, no matter what the time of day 
may be. 

As with almost all game except antelope, they 
17 



258 Ranch Life 

can be best hiinted in the morning and even- 
ing; but, unlike deer, they can also be followed 
throughout the day, for whereas elk, black-tail, 
and white-tail have then all alike retired to the 
thickets, the big-horn take their noontide rest 
lying out in plain view. If the hunter means to 
catch them feeding he should make a very early 
start. A good pair of field-glasses is of great ser- 
vice, for the two essential requisites to success are 
the capacity to take long walks over rough ground 
and painstaking care in scanning the country far 
and wide, so as to see the game before it sees the 
hunter. There is then a chance to stalk up close, 
the broken groimd frequently yielding good cover. 
Often it may be necessary to lie for hours care- 
fully concealed, watching a flock that is in an 
unfavorable position, and waiting until it shifts 
its groimd. This is not very comfortable on a 
cold day in November or December, the months 
in which I have usually hunted big-horn, devoting 
the early fall to the chase of elk and deer. But it 
is often the only way to secure success : patience 
and perseverance are two of the still -hunter's 
cardinal virtues. Personally I have always owed 
whatever success I have had to dogged perse- 
verance and patient persistence, and on a lament- 
ably large number of occasions have had to draw 
heavily on these qualities to make good a lack of 
skill, sometimes with the rifle, sometimes in moiin- 



The Big-Horn Sheep 259 

taineering. Among many hunting trips I can 
recall not a few where willingness to lie still two or 
three hours imder trying circumstances in the end 
got me the game; and one such instance may 
serve as a sample of the rest. 

I was staying at the line camp of two of my 
cowboys, a small dug-out in the side of a butte 
that marked the edge of the Bad Lands, the roll- 
ing prairie coming up to its base. The quarters 
were cramped for three men, an entire side of the 
little hut being filled by the two bunks in which 
we slept, — I in the upper, my two companions in 
the lower, — while the fireplace occupied one end, 
the mess-box served as a table, and the earth- 
covered roof of logs was so low that we could 
hardly stand upright. Window there was none; 
but it was snug, and, for a line camp, clean. 
There was plenty of firewood, and, for a wonder, 
the chimney did not smoke ; so we were comfort- 
able enough. The butte itself served for three 
out of the four walls. No other building is so 
w^arm as a dug-out, and in the terrible winter 
weather of Dakota and Montana warmth is the 
one thing for which all else must be sacrificed.' 

In such high latitudes the December sun rises 
late. Long before daybreak we had finished our 

'I have camped out when the thermometer showed 65 
degrees of frost; not — 65°, as I see I once put it by a mis- 
take in copying my rough lield-notes. 



26o Ranch Life 

breakfast of bread, beans, and coffee. The two 
cowboys had saddled their shaggy ponies — which 
had spent the night in the rough log stable — and 
had ridden off in opposite directions along their 
lonely beat, muffled in their wolf-skin overcoats 
and heavy shaps ; while I strode off on foot toward 
the high hills that lay riverward, my rifle on my 
shoulder and my fur cap pulled down well over 
my ears. 

The cold was biting, for even at noon the sun 
had not power to thaw the frozen ground. But 
there was very little snow ; just enough to powder 
the hills and to lie in patches in the hollows. I 
walked rapidly up a long coulee, then climbed up 
a steep rotmded hill and followed the divide back 
into the heart of the Bad Lands. By the time I 
was on my chosen hunting-grounds the sun had 
topped the horizon behind me, and his level rays 
lit up the peaks and crests. 

The next hour was spent in hard climbing and 
incessant watchfulness. The hills lay in isolated 
masses. I clambered painfully up their slippery 
sides, creeping along the narrow icy ledges that 
ran across the faces of the cliffs, and cautiously 
working my way over the smooth shoulders. 
From behind every ridge and spur I carefully 
examined the opposite hillsides, using the field- 
glasses if there was scope for them. Sheep, stand- 
ing still or lying down, are often very hard to see, 



The Big-Horn vSheep 261 

their coats assimilating curiously with the neutral- 
tinted cliffs and boulders ; but against snow they 
of course stand out much more distinctly. 

At last, as I lay peeping over the ragged crest 
of a clay butte, I made out a small dark object 
half way up a steep slope some six himdred yards 
down the valley; and another look showed me 
that it was a ram feeding leisurely up the hill- 
side. The wdnd was good for a direct approach. 
I got off the butte by carefully letting myself down 
from one little ledge or niche to another, and 
started along the valley toward the ram, only to 
find my way barred by a deep chasm whose 
straight, ice-coated sides yawned too far apart to 
permit of any attempt at crossing. There was no 
help for it but laboriously to retrace my steps and 
make my way roimd its head with what speed I 
could. This I did, the work making me thor- 
oughly warm for the first time that morning. 
Once across the walking was better, and I went 
down the valley-side at a good pace, until I came 
to a shoulder some two himdred yards from where 
I had seen the sheep. I was a good deal higher 
than where he had stood ; but in the time I had 
been out of sight of him he must have gone up 
the hill quite a distance, for when I looked round 
the shoulder I saw him about as far off as I ex- 
pected, but above instead of below me. Slow 
though my movements had been when I cau- 



262 Ranch Life 

tiously looked round the edge, they had not 
escaped his quick eye ; for when I made him out 
he was standing motionless, gazing in my direc- 
tion. Before I could raise my rifle he gave a 
great jump sideways and galloped off, disappear- 
ing instantly behind a huge mass of detached 
sandstone, and I never saw him again. 

A little chagrined at my fruitless stalk I plodded 
on, doing much hard climbing, but seeing no signs 
of game until nearly midday. Then in the snow 
at the head of a coulee I came across the tracks 
of a band evidently made that morning while 
returning from the feeding-groimds. I followed 
them until I became convinced that the animals 
had gone to a great table-land or plateau that I 
could see a good way ahead; then, as the wind 
was behind me, I struck off to one side, made a 
circle through some very rough country, and 
clambered out along the knife-like crests of a line 
of high hills separated from the plateau by a broad 
valley. Every hundred paces or so I would stop 
and examine the country far and near with the 
glasses ; often I had to crawl on all-fours to avoid 
appearing against the sky-line on the ridge. 

At last I caught sight of the band. There were 
some fifteen or twenty of them, and they were 
lying at the point of a spur that was thrust out 
from the plateau, nearly opposite to me and half 
a mile off. They were in a position which it was 



The Big-Horn Sheep 263 

impossible to approach within six hundred yards 
without being observed, for they could see over 
the level plateau behind them, and from the brink 
of the lofty cliff on which they lay they looked 
up, dowTi, and across the wild, deep valley beneath. 

With the glasses I could make out that there 
was no good head among them ; but I was out for 
meat rather than for sport. They were very 
watchful, ever on the lookout; and as the after- 
noon wore on one of the more restless would now 
and then get up, walk off a few steps, or stand 
gazing intently into the far distance. There was 
nothing for me to do except to wait imtil they 
grew hiingry and shifted their position to some 
place which there was a chance of my approach- 
ing unseen. So for three hours I lay on the iron 
groimd, under the lee of a boulder that but partly 
shielded me from the wind, munching the strip of 
jerked venison I had carried in my pocket, and 
peeping at the sheep through a tuft of tall, coarse 
grass that grew on top of the ridge. 

At last, when it wanted but little more than an 
hour of sunset, the sheep all got on their legs, one 
after another, and, led by an old ewe, began to 
descend into the valley. They went down the 
cliff by a sort of break or slide, hopping dexter- 
ously from rock to rock. On coming to the steep 
slope at its foot they struck into a trot, which 
merged into a fast gallop as they got nearly down. 



264 Ranch Life 

I feared that they would stop before coming to 
the canyon at the bottom of the valley ; but they 
did not, crossing it without hesitation, for all its 
sheer-sided and slippery depth, and continuing 
their course toward the end of the chain of hills 
on which I was, where they halted to graze, after 
going up nearly to the top. It was excellent 
ground for a stalk. The ridge went down to the 
left in the steep, grassy slopes on which they were 
feeding, while on the right it broke abruptly off 
into a precipice, with a narrow ledge high up along 
its face. 

This ledge made the approach an easy one. 
The only difficult places were those where the 
ledge was interrupted, and I had either cautiously 
to make my way along the face of the cliff, — a 
very unpleasant task, as the slight hollow^s or 
knobs which served me as footholds were slippery 
with ice, the risk of a fall being thus enormously 
increased, — or else was forced to go to the top, 
and, sprawling flat on the smooth slope, drag 
myself along just to one side of the ridge. I had 
marked the position of the game by a dwarfed 
cedar that grew in a crevice on the very crest. It 
gave excellent cover, and on reaching it and peer- 
ing out through the branches, I saw the sheep 
scattered out only some sixty yards below me, 
and, choosing out a fine yoimg ram, I fired, break- 
ing both shoulders. They all rushed together, and 



The Big-Horn vSheep 265 

then without an instant's pause raced madly downi 
the hillside, neither of the two bullets that I sent 
after them taking effect, I had no time to lose; 
so I dressed the ram hastily, tilted him up so that 
the blood would run out, and left him to be called 
for with the pony next day. Then I made the 
best use of the waning light to get to a long divide, 
furrowed by many buffalo trails, which I knew I 
could follow even when it grew dark, and which 
came out on the prairie not very far to one side 
of the line camp. 

The day on which I was lucky enough to shoot 
my largest and finest ram was memorable in more 
ways than one. The shot was one of the best I 
ever made, — albeit the element of chance doubt- 
less entered into it far more largely than the 
element of skill, — and in coming home from the 
hunt I got quite badly frozen. 

The day before we had come back from a week's 
trip after deer; for we were laying in the winter 
stock of meat. We had been camped far down 
the river, and had intended to take two days on 
the return trip, as the wagon was rather heavily 
loaded, for we had killed eight deer. The morn- 
ing we broke camp was so mild that I did not put 
on my heaviest winter clothing, starting off in the 
same that I had worn durmg the past few days' 
still-hunting among the hills. Before we had been 
gone an hour, however, the sky grew overcast and 



266 Ranch Life 

the wind began to blow from the north with con- 
stantly increasing vigor. The sky grew steadily 
more gloomy and lowering, the gusts came ever 
harder and harder, and by noon the vvinter day 
had darkened and a furious gale was driving 
against us. The blasts almost swept me from 
my saddle and the teamster from his seat, while 
we were glad to wrap ourselves in our huge fur 
coats to keep out the growing cold. Soon after 
midday the wagon suddenly broke down while 
we were yet in mid-prairie. It was evident that 
we were on the eve of a furious snow-blizzard, 
which might last a few hours, or else, perhaps, 
as many days. We were miles from any shelter 
that would permit us to light a fire in the face of 
such a storm; so we left the wagon as it was, 
hastily unharnessed the team horses, and, with 
the driver riding one and leading the other, struck 
off homeward at a steady gallop. Once fairly 
caught by the blizzard in a coimtry that we only 
partly knew, it would have been hopeless to do 
more than to try for some ravine in which to 
cower till it was over; so we pushed our horses 
to their utmost pace. Our object was to reach 
the head coulees of a creek leading down to the 
river but a few miles from the ranch. Could we 
get into these before the snow struck us we felt 
we would be all right, for we could then find our 
w^ay home, even in pitch-darkness, with the wind 



The Big-Horn Sheep 267 

in the quarter from which it was coming. So, 
■v^dth the stonn on our backs, we rode at full speed 
through the gathering gloom, across the desolate 
reaches of prairie. The tough little horses, in- 
stead of faltering, went stronger mile by mile. 
At last the weird rows of hills loomed vaguely up 
in our front, and we plunged into the deep ravines 
for which we had been heading just as the whirling 
white wreaths struck us — not the soft, feathery 
flakes of a seaboard snow-storm, but fine ice- 
dust, driven level by the wind, choking us, blind- 
ing our eyes, and cutting our faces if we turned 
toward it. The roar of the blizzard drowned our 
voices when we were but six feet apart: had it 
not been on our backs we could not have gone a 
himdred yards, for we could no more face it than 
we could face a frozen sand-blast. In an instant 
the strange, wild outlines of the high buttes 
between which we were riding were shrouded 
from our sight. We had to grope our way through 
a kind of shimmering dusk; and when once or 
tw4ce we were obliged by some impassable cliff 
or canyon to retrace our steps, it was all that 
we could do to urge the horses even a few paces 
against the wind-blown snow-grains which stung 
like steel filings. But this extreme violence only 
lasted about four hours. The moon was full, and 
its beams struggled through scudding clouds and 
snow-drift, so that we reached the ranch without 



268 Ranch Life 

difficulty, and when we got there the wind had 
already begun to lull. The snow still fell thick 
and fast; but before we went to bed this also 
showed signs of stopping. Accordingly we deter- 
mined that we would leave the wagon where it 
was for a day or two, and start early next morning 
for a range of high hills some ten miles off, much 
hatmted by sheep ; for we did not wish to let pass 
the chance of tracking the game offered by the 
first good snow of the season. 

Next morning we started by starlight. The 
snow lay several inches deep on the groiind; the 
whole land was a dazzling white. It was very 
cold. Within the ranch everything was frozen 
solid in spite of the thick log walls; but the air 
was so still and clear that we did not realize how 
low the temperature was. Accordingly, as the 
fresh horse I had to take was young and wild, I 
did not attempt to wear my fur coat. I soon felt 
my mistake. The windless cold ate into my mar- 
row ; and when, shortly after the cloudless winter 
sunrise, we reached our hunting-grounds and 
picketed out the horses, I was already slightly 
frostbitten. But the toil of hunting over the 
snow-covered crags soon made me warm. 

All day we walked and climbed through a white 
wonderland. On every side the snowy hills, piled 
one on another, stretched away, chain after chain, 
as far as sight could reach. The stem and iron- 



The Big-Horn Sheep 269 

bound land had been changed to a frozen sea of 
billowy, glittering peaks and ridges. At last, late 
in the afternoon, three great big-horn suddenly 
sprang up to our right and crossed the table-land 
in front of and below us at a strong, stretching 
gallop. The lengthening sunbeams glinted on 
their mighty horns; their great supple brown 
bodies were thrown out in bold relief against the 
white landscape ; as they plowed with long strides 
through the powdery snow, their hoofs tossed it 
up in masses of white spray. On the left of the 
plateau was a ridge, and as they went up this I 
twice fired at the leading ram, my bullets striking 
under him. On the summit he stopped and stood 
for a moment looking back three hundred and fifty 
yards off,' and my third shot went fairly through 
his limgs. He ran over the hill as if imharmed, 
but lay doTATi a couple of hundred yards on, and 
was dead when we reached him. 

It was after nightfall when we got back to the 
horses, and we rode home by moonlight. To 
gallop in such weather insures freezing; so the 
ponies shambled along at a single-foot trot, their 
dark bodies white with hoar-frost, and the long 
icicles hanging from their lips. The cold had 
increased steadily ; the spirit thermometer at the 
ranch showed 26° Fahrenheit below zero. We 
had worked all day without food or rest, and were 

'Actual pacing, not guesswork. 



270 Ranch Life 

very tired. On the ride home I got benumbed 
before I knew it and froze my face, one foot, and 
both knees. Even my companion, who had a 
great-coat, froze his nose and cheeks. Never was 
a sight more welcome than the gleam of the fire- 
lit ranch windows to us that night. But the great 
ram's head was a trophy that paid for all. 



CHAPTER XII. 

THE GAME OF THE HIGH PEAKS: THE WHITE GOAT. 

IN the fall of 1886 I went far west to the 
Rockies and took a fortnight's hunting trip 
among the northern spurs of the Coeur 
d'Alene, between the towns of Heron and Horse- 
plains in Montana. There are many kinds of 
game to be found in the least known or still 
untrodden parts of this wooded moimtain wilder- 
ness — caribou, elk, imgainly moose with great 
shovel horns, cougars, and bears. But I did not 
have time to go deeply into the heart of the 
forest-clad ranges, and devoted my entire energies 
to the chase of but one animal, the white antelope- 
goat, then the least known and rarest of all Ameri- 
can game. 

We started from one of those most dismal and 
forlorn of all places, a dead mining town, on the 
line of the Northern Pacific Railroad. My fore- 
man, Merrifield, was with me, and for guide I 
took a tall, lithe, happy-go-lucky mountaineer, 
who, like so many of the restless frontier race, 
was bom in Missouri. Our outfit was simple, as 
we carried only blankets, a light wagon sheet, the 
ever-present camera, flour, bacon, salt, sugar, and 
coffee: canned goods are very imhandy to pack 

271 



272 Ranch Life 

about on horseback. Our rifles and ammunition, 
with the few cooking-utensils and a book or two, 
completed the list. Four solemn ponies and a 
ridiculous little mule named Walla Walla bore us 
and our belongings. The Alissourian was an 
expert packer, versed in the mysteries of the 
"diamond hitch," the only arrangement of the 
ropes that will insure a load staying in its place. 
Driving a pack train through the wooded paths 
and up the mountain passes that we had to 
traverse is hard work anyhow, as there are sure 
to be accidents happening to the animals all the 
time, while their packs receive rough treatment 
from jutting rocks and overhanging branches, or 
from the half-fallen tree-trunks under which the 
animals wriggle ; and if the loads are continually 
coming loose, or slipping so as to gall the horses' 
backs and make them sore, the labor and anxiety 
are increased tenfold. 

In a day or two we were in the heart of the 
vast wooded wilderness. A broad, lonely river 
ran through its midst, cleaving asunder the 
mountain chains. Range after range, peak upon 
peak, the mountains towered on every side, the 
lower timbered to the top, the higher with bare 
crests of gray crags, or else hooded with fields of 
shining snow. The deep valleys lay half in 
darkness, hemmed in by steep, timbered slopes 
and straight rock walls. The torrents, broken 



The Game of the High Peaks 273 

into glittering foam masses, sprang down through 
the chasms that they had rent in the sides of the 
high hills, lingered in black pools under the 
shadows of the scarred cliffs, and reaching the 
rank, tree-choked valleys, gathered into rapid 
streams of clear brown water, that drenched the 
drooping limbs of the tangled alders. Over the 
whole land lay like a shroud the mighty growth 
of the imbroken evergreen forest — spruce and 
hemlock, fir, balsam, tamarack, and lofty pine. 

Yet even these vast wastes of shadowy wood- 
land were once penetrated by members of that 
adventurous and now fast vanishing folk, the 
American frontiersmen. Once or twice, while 
walking silently over the spongy moss beneath 
the somber archways of the pines, we saw on a 
tree-trunk a dim, faint ax-scar, the bark almost 
grown over it, showing where, many years before, 
some fur-trapper had chopped a deeper blaze than 
usual in making out a "spotted line" — man's first 
highway in the primeval forest; or on some hill- 
side we would come to the more recent, but 
already half -obliterated, traces of a miner's handi- 
work. The trapper and the miner were the 
pioneers of the mountains, as the hunter and 
the cowboy have been the pioneers of the plains ; 
they are all of the same type, these sinewy men of 
the border, fearless and self-reliant, who are ever 
driven restlessly onward through the wilderness 
18 



274 Ranch Life 

by the half -formed desires that make their 
eyes haggard and eager. There is no plain so 
lonely that their feet have not trodden it; no 
moimtain so far off that their eyes have not 
scanned its grandeur. 

We took nearly a week in going to our himting- 
grounds and out from them again. This was 
tedious work, for the pace was slow, and it was 
accompanied with some real labor. In places the 
motintain paths were very steep and the ponies 
could with difficulty scramble along them; and 
once or twice they got falls that no animals less 
tough could have survived, Walla Walla being 
the imfortunate that suffered most. Often, more- 
over, we would come to a windfall, where the 
fallen trees lay heaped crosswise on one another 
in the wildest confusion, and a road had to be 
cleared by ax work. It was marvelous to see the 
philosophy with which the wise little beasts 
behaved, picking their way gingerly through 
these rough spots, hopping over fallen tree- 
tnmks, or stepping between them in places where 
an Eastern horse would have snapped a leg short 
off, and walking composedly along narrow ledges 
with steep precipices below. They were tame and 
friendly, being turned loose at night, and not only 
staying near by, but also allowing themselves to 
be caught without difficulty in the morning; 
industriously gleaning the scant food to be found 



The Game of the High Peaks 275 

in the burnt places or along the edges of the 
brooks, and often in the evening standing in a 
patient, solemn semicircle round the camp fire, 
just beyond where we were seated. Walla Walla, 
the little mule, was always in scrapes. Once we 
spent a morning of awkward industry in washing 
our clothes ; having finished, we spread the half- 
cleansed array upon the bushes and departed on 
a hunt. On returning, to our horror we spied the 
miserable Walla Walla shamefacedly shambling 
off from the neighborhood of the wash, having 
partly chewed up every individual garment and 
completely imdone all our morning's labor. 

At first we did not have good weather. The 
Indians, of whom we met a small band, — said to be 
Flatheads or their kin, on a visit from the coast 
region, — had set fire to the woods not far away, 
and the smoke became so dense as to hurt our 
eyes, to hide the sun at midday, and to veil all 
objects from our sight as completely as if there 
had been a hea\'y fog. Then we had two days of 
incessant rain, which rendered our camp none too 
comfortable ; but when this cleared we found that 
it had put out the fire and settled all the smoke, 
leaving a brilliant sky overhead. 

We first camped in a narrow valley, surrounded 
by mountains so tall that except at noonday it 
lay in the shadow; and it was only when we 
were out late on the higher foot-hills that we saw 



276 Ranch Life 

the sun sink in a flame behind the distant ranges. 
The trees grew tall and thick, the underbrush 
choking the ground between their trunks, and 
their branches interlacing so that the sun's rays 
hardly came through them. There were very few 
open glades, and these were not more than a dozen 
rods or so across. Even on the moimtains it was 
only when we got up very high indeed, or when 
we struck an occasional bare spur, or shoulder, 
that we could get a glimpse into the open. Else- 
where we could never see a hundred yards ahead 
of us, and like all plainsmen or mountaineers we 
at times felt smothered imder the trees, and longed 
to be where we could look out far and wide on 
every side ; we felt as if our heads were in hoods. 
A broad brook whirled and eddied past our camp, 
and a little below us was caught in a deep, narrow 
gorge, where the strangling rocks churned its swift 
current into spray and foam, and changed its mur- 
murous humming and splashing into an angry 
roar. Strange little water wrens — the water- 
ousel of the books — made this brook their home. 
They were shaped like thrushes, and sometimes 
warbled sweetly, yet they lived right in the tor- 
rent, not only flitting along the banks and wading 
in the edges, but plunging boldly into midstream, 
and half walking, half flying along the bottom, 
deep under water, and perching on the slippery, 
spray-covered rocks of the waterfall or skimming 



The Game of the High Peaks 277 

over and through the rapids even more often than 
they ran along the margins of the deep, black 
pools. 

White-tail deer were plentiful, and we kept our 
camp abundantly supplied with venison, varying 
it with all the grouse that we wanted, and with 
quantities of fresh trout. But I myself spent 
most of my time after the quarry I had come to 
get — the white goat. 

White goats have been known to himters ever 
since Lewis and Clarke crossed the continent, but 
they have always ranked as the very rarest and 
most difficult to get of all American game. This 
reputation they owe to the nature of their haimts, 
rather than to their own wariness, for they have 
been so little disturbed that they are less shy than 
either deer or sheep. They are found here and 
there on the highest, most inaccessible mountain 
peaks down even to Arizona and New Mexico ; but 
being fitted for cold climates, they are extremely 
scarce everywhere south of Montana and northern 
Idaho, and the great majority even of the most 
experienced hunters have hardly so much as heard 
of their existence. In Washington Territory, 
northern Idaho, and northwestern Montana they 
are not uncommon, and are plentiful in parts of 
the moimtain ranges of British America and 
Alaska. Their preference for the highest peaks 
is due mainly to their dislike of warmth, and in 



278 Ranch Life 

the north — even south of the Canadian line — they 
are found much lower down the mountains than 
is the case farther south. They are very con- 
spicuous animals, with their snow-white coats and 
polished black horns, but their pursuit necessi- 
tates so much toil and hardship that not one in 
ten of the professional htmters has ever killed one ; 
and I know of but one or two Eastern sportsmen 
who can boast a goat's head as a trophy. But 
this will soon cease to be the case ; for the Cana- 
dian Pacific Railway has opened the haimts where 
the goats are most plentiful, and any moderately 
adventurous and hardy rifleman can be sure of 
getting one by taking a little time, and that, too, 
whether he is a skilled hunter or not, since at 
present the game is not difficult to approach. The 
white goat will be common long after the elk has 
vanished, and it has already outlasted the buffalo. 
Few sportsmen henceforth — indeed, hardly any — 
will ever boast a buffalo head of their own killing ; 
but the number of riflemen who can place to their 
credit the prized white fleeces and jet-black horns 
will steadily increase. 

The Missourian, during his career as a Rocky 
Mountain hiinter, had killed five white goats. 
The first he had shot near Canyon City, Colorado, 
and never having heard of any such animal before 
had concluded afterward that it was one of a flock 
of recently imported Angora goats, and accord- 



The Game of the Hio^h Peaks 279 



ingly, to avoid trouble, buried it where it lay ; and 
it was not until fourteen years later, when he came 
up to the Coeur d'Alene and shot another, that he 
became aware of what he had killed . He described 
them as being bold, pugnacious animals, not easily 
startled, and extremely tenacious of life. Once 
he had set a large hound at one which he came 
across while descending an ice-swollen river in 
early spring. The goat made no attempt to flee 
or to avoid the hound, but coolly awaited its ap- 
proach and killed it with one wicked thrust of the 
horns ; for the latter are as sharp as needles, and 
are used for stabbing, not butting. Another time 
he caught a goat in a bear trap set on a game 
trail. Its leg was broken, and he had to pack it 
out on pony-back, a two-days' journey, to the 
settlement ; yet in spite of such rough treatment 
it lived a week after it got there, when, imfortu- 
nately, the woimded leg mortified. It fought 
most determinedly, but soon became reconciled 
to captivity, eating with avidity all the grass it 
was given, recognizing its keeper, and grunting 
w^henever he brought it food or started to walk 
away before it had had all it wished. The goats 
he had shot lived in ground where the walking 
was tiresome to the last degree, and w^here it was 
almost impossible not to make a good deal of 
noise; and nothing but their boldness and curi- 
osity enabled him ever to kill any. One he shot 



28o Ranch Life 

while waiting at a pass for deer. The goat, an 
old male, came up, and fairly refused to leave the 
spot, walking round in the underbrush and finally 
mounting a great fallen log, where he stayed snort- 
ing and stamping angrily until the Missourian lost 
patience and killed him. 

For three or four days I htinted steadily and 
without success, and it was as hard work as any 
that I had ever tindertaken. Both Merrifield and 
I were accustomed to a life in the saddle, and 
although we had varied it with an occasional long 
walk after deer or sheep, yet we were utterly un- 
able to cope with the Missourian when it came to 
mountaineering. When we had previously himted, 
in the Big Horn Moimtains, we had found stout 
moccasins most comfortable, and extremely useful 
for still-hunting through the great woods and 
among the open glades; but the multitudinous 
sharp rocks and sheer, cliff -like slopes of the Coeur 
d'Alene rendered our moccasins absolutely useless, 
for the first day's tramp bruised our feet till they 
were sore and slit our foot-gear into ribbons, 
besides tearing our clothes. ]\Ierrifield was then 
crippled, having nothing else but his cowboy boots ; 
fortimately, I had taken in addition a pair of shoes 
with soles thickly studded with nails. 

We would start immediately after breakfast 
each morning, carrying a light lunch in our 
pockets, and go straight up the mountain sides 



The Game of the High Peaks 281 

for hours at a time, varying it by skirting the 
broad, terrace-Hke ledges, or by clambering along 
the cliff crests. The climbing was very hard. 
The slope was so steep that it was like going 
upstairs ; now through loose earth, then through 
a shingle of pebbles or sand, then over rough 
rocks, and again over a layer of pine needles as 
smooth and slippery as glass, while brittle, dry 
sticks that snapped at a touch, and loose stones 
that rattled down if so much as brushed, strewed 
the grotmd everywhere, the climber stumbling 
and falling over them and finding it almost abso- 
lutely impossible to proceed without noise, unless 
at a rate of progress too slow to admit of getting 
anywhere. Often, too, we would encoimter dense 
underbrush, perhaps a thicket of little burnt 
balsams, as prickly and brittle as so much coral ; 
or else a heavy growth of laurel, all the branches 
pointing downward, and to be gotten through 
only by main force. Over all grew the vast ever- 
green forest, except where an occasional cliff 
jutted out, or where there were great land-slides, 
each perhaps half a mile long and a couple of 
hundred yards across, covered with loose slates 
or granite boulders. 

We always went above the domain of the deer, 
and indeed saw few evidences of life. Once or 
twice we came to the roimd foot-prints of cougars, 
which are said to be great enemies of the goats, 



282 Ranch Life 

but we never caught a glimpse of the sly beasts 
themselves. Another time I shot a sable from 
a spruce, up which the little fox-headed animal 
had rushed with the agility of a squirrel. There 
were plenty of old tracks of bear and elk, but no 
new ones; and occasionally we saw the foot- 
marks of the great timber wolf. 

But the trails at w^hich we looked with the most 
absorbed interest were those that showed the 
large, round hoof -marks of the white goats. They 
had worn deep paths to certain clay licks in the 
slides, which they must have visited often in the 
early spring, for the trails were little traveled 
when we were in the mountains during September. 
These clay licks were mere holes in the banks, 
and were in spring-time visited by other animals 
besides goats ; there were old deer trails to them. 
The clay seemed to contain something that both 
birds and beasts were fond of, for I frequently 
saw flocks of cross-bills light in the licks and stay 
there for many minutes at a time, scratching the 
smooth surface with their little claws and bills. 
The goat trails led away in every direction from 
the licks, but usually went up-hill, zigzagging or 
in a straight line, and continually growing fainter 
as they went farther off, where the animals scat- 
tered to their feeding-grounds. In the spring- 
i time the goats are clad with a dense coat of long 
white wool, and there were shreds and tufts of 



The Game of the Hior-h Peaks 283 



&' 



this on all the twigs of the bushes under which 
the paths passed; in the early fall the coat is 
shorter and less handsome. 

Although these game paths were so deeply 
worn, they yet showed very little fresh goat sign ; 
in fact, we came across the recent trails of but 
two of the animals we were after. One of these 
we came quite close to, but never saw it, for we 
must have frightened it by the noise we made; 
it certainly, to judge by its tracks, which we 
followed for a long time, took itself straight out 
of the country. The other I finally got, after 
some heart-breaking work and a complicated 
series of faults committed and misfortimes en- 
dured. 

I had been, as usual, walking and clambering 
over the mountains all day long, and in mid- 
afternoon reached a great slide, with half-way 
across it a tree. Under this I sat down to rest, 
my back to the trunk, and had been there but a 
few minutes, when my companion, the Mis- 
sourian, suddenly whispered to me that a goat 
was coming down the slide at its edge, near the 
woods. I was in a most imcomfortable position 
for a shot. Twisting my head round, I could see 
the goat waddling down-hill, looking just like a 
handsome tame billy, especially when at times he 
stood upon a stone to glance aroimd, with all 
four feet close together. I cautiously tried to 



284 Ranch Life 

shift my position, and at once dislodged some 
pebbles, at the soimd of which the goat sprang 
promptly up on the bank, his whole mien changing 
into one of alert, alarmed curiosity. He was less 
than a hundred yards off, so I risked a shot, all 
cramped and twisted though I was. But my 
bullet went low; I only broke his left fore-leg, 
and he disappeared over the bank like a flash. 
We raced and scrambled after him, and the Mis- 
sourian, an excellent tracker, took up the bloody 
trail. It went along the hill-side for nearly a 
mile, and then turned straight up the mountain, 
the Missourian leading with his long, free gait, 
while I toiled after him at a dogged trot. The 
trail went up the sharpest and steepest places, 
skirting the cliffs and precipices. At one spot I 
nearly came to grief for good and all, for in 
nmning along a shelving ledge, covered with 
loose slates, one of these slipped as I stepped on 
it, throwing me clear over the brink. However, 
I caught in a pine top, boimced down through it, 
and brought up in a balsam with my rifle all right, 
and myself unhurt except for the shaking. I 
scrambled up at once and raced on after my 
companion, whose limbs and wind seemed alike 
incapable of giving out. This work lasted for a 
couple of hours. 

The trail came into a regular game path and 
grew fresher, the goat having stopped to roll 



The Game of the High Peaks 285 

and wallow in the dust now and then . Suddenly, 
on the top of the mountain, we came upon him 
close up to us. He had just risen from rolling 
and stood behind a huge fallen log, his back 
barely showing above it as he turned his head to 
look at us. I was completely winded, and had 
lost my strength as well as my breath, while great 
bead-like drops of sweat stood in my eyes; but 
I steadied myself as well as I could and aimed to 
break the backbone, the only shot open to me, 
and not a difficult one at such a short distance. 
However, my bullet went just too high, cutting 
the skin above the long spinal bones over the 
shoulders; and the speed with which that three- 
legged goat went down the precipitous side of the 
mountain would have done credit to an antelope 
on the level. 

Weary and disgusted, we again took up the 
trail. It led straight down-hill, and we followed 
it at a smart pace. Down and down it went, into 
the valley and straight to the edge of the stream, 
but half a mile above camp. The goat had 
crossed the water on a fallen tree-tnmk, and we 
took the same path. Once across, it had again 
gone right up the moimtain. We followed it as 
fast as we could, although pretty nearly done out, 
until it was too dark to see the blood-stains any 
longer, and then returned to camp, dispirited and 
so tired that we could hardly drag ourselves along, 



286 Ranch Life 

for we had been going at speed for five hours, up 
and down the roughest and steepest ground. 

But we were confident that the goat would not 
travel far with such a wound after he had been 
chased as we had chased him. Next morning 
at daybreak we again climbed the mountain and 
took up the trail. Soon it led into others and 
we lost it, but we kept up the hunt nevertheless 
for hour after hour, making continually wider and 
wider circles. At last, about midday, our perse- 
verance was rewarded, for coming silently out on 
a great bare cliff shoulder, I spied the goat lying 
on a ledge below me and some seventy yards off. 
This time I shot true, and he rose only to fall 
back dead ; and a minute afterward we were 
standing over him, handling the glossy black 
horns and admiring the snow-white coat. 

After this we struck our tent and shifted camp 
some thirty miles to a wide valley through w^hose 
pine-clad bottom flowed a river, hurrying on to 
the Pacific between unending forests. On one 
hand the valley was hemmed in by an unbroken 
line of frowning cliffs, and on the other by chains 
of lofty mountains in whose sides the ravines cut 
deep gashes. 

The clear weather had grown colder. At night 
the frost skimmed with thin ice the edges of the 
ponds and small lakes that at long intervals 
dotted the vast reaches of woodland. But we 



The Game of the High Peaks 287 

were very comfortable, and hardly needed our 
furs, for as evening fell we kindled huge fires, to 
give us both light and warmth ; and even in very 
cold weather a man can sleep out comfortably 
enough with no bedding if he lights two fires and 
gets in between them, or finds a sheltered nook 
or comer across the front of which a single great 
blaze can be made. The long walks and our 
work as cragsmen hardened our thews, and made 
us eat and sleep as even our life on the ranch 
could hardly do: the mountaineer must always 
be more sinewy than the horseman. The clear, 
cold water of the swift streams too was a welcome 
change from the tepid and muddy currents of the 
rivers of the plains; and we heartily enjoyed 
the baths, a plimge into one of the icy pools 
making us gasp for breath and causing the blood 
to tingle in our veins with the shock. 

Our tent was pitched in a little glade, which 
was but a few yards across, and carpeted thickly 
with the red kinnikinic berries, in their season 
beloved of bears, and from the leaves of which 
bush the Indians make a substitute for tobacco. 
Little three-toed woodpeckers with yellow crests 
scrambled about over the trees near by, while the 
great log-cocks hammered and rattled on the tall 
dead trunks. Jays that were dark blue all over 
came familiarly round camp in company with the 
ever-present moose-birds or whisky jacks. There 



288 Ranch Life 

were many grouse in the woods, of three kinds, — 
blue, spruce, and ruffed, — and these varied our 
diet and also furnished us with some sport with 
our rifles, as we always shot them in rivalry. 
That is, each would take a shot in turn, aiming 
at the head of the bird, as it perched motionless 
on the limb of a tree or stopped for a second while 
running along the ground ; then if he missed or 
hit the bird anywhere but in the head, the other 
scored one and took the shot. The resulting tally 
was a good test of comparative skill ; and rivalry 
always tends to keep a man's shooting up to the 
mark. 

Once or twice, when we had slain deer, we 
watched by the carcasses, hoping that they would 
attract a bear, or perhaps one of the huge timber 
wolves whose mournful, sinister howling we heard 
each night. But there were no bears in the 
valley ; and the wolves, those cruel, crafty beasts, 
were far too cunning to come to the bait while 
we were there. We saw nothing but crowds of 
ravens, whose hoarse barking and croaking filled 
the air as they circled around overhead, lighted 
in the trees, or quarreled over the carcass. Yet 
although we saw no game it was very pleasant 
to sit out, on the still evenings, among the tall 
pines or on the edge of a great gorge, until the 
afterglow of the sunset was dispelled by the 
beams of the frosty moon. Now and again 



The Game of the High Peaks 289 

the hush would be suddenly broken by the long 
howling of a wolf, that echoed and rang under 
the hollow woods and through the deep chasms 
until they resounded again, while it made our 
hearts bound and the blood leap in our veins. 
Then there would be silence once more, broken 
only by the rush of the river and the low moaning 
and creaking of the pines; or the strange calling 
of the owls might be answered by the far-off, 
unearthly laughter of a loon, its voice carried 
through the stillness a marvelous distance from 
the little lake on which it was swimming. 

One day, after much toilsome and in places 
almost dangerous work, we climbed to the very 
top of the nearest mountain chain, and from it 
looked out over a limitless, billowy field of snow- 
capped ranges. Up above the timber line were 
snow-grouse and huge, hoary-white woodchucks, 
but no trace of the game we were after; for, 
rather to our surprise, the few goat signs that we 
saw were in the timber. I did not catch another 
glimpse of the animals themselves imtil my 
holiday was almost over and we were preparing 
to break camp. Then I saw two, I had spent 
a most laborious day on the mountain as usual, 
following the goat paths, which were well-trodden 
trails leading up the most inaccessible places; 
certainly the white goats are marvelous climbers, 
doing it all by main strength and perfect 
19 



290 Ranch Life 

command over their muscles, for they are heavy, 
clumsy seeming animals, the reverse of graceful, 
and utterly without any look of light agility. 
As usual, toward evening I was pretty well tired 
out, for it would be difficult to imagine harder 
work than to clamber imendingly up and down 
the huge cliffs. I came down along a great 
jutting spur, broken by a series of precipices, 
with fiat terraces at their feet, the terraces being 
covered with trees and bushes, and running, with 
many breaks and interruptions, parallel to each 
other across the face of the mountains. On one 
of these terraces was a space of hard clay ground 
beaten perfectly bare of vegetation by the hoofs 
of the goats, and, in the middle, a hole, two or 
three feet in width, that was evidently in the 
spring used as a lick. Most of the tracks were 
old, but there was one trail coming diagonally 
down the side of the moimtain on which there 
were two or three that were very fresh. It was 
getting late, so I did not stay long, but continued 
the descent. The terrace on which the lick was 
situated lay but a few htmdred yards above the 
valley, and then came a level, marshy plain a 
quarter of a mile broad, between the base of the 
mountain and the woods. Leading down to this 
plain was another old goat-trail, which went to a 
small, boggy pool, which the goats must certainly 
have often visited in the spring ; but it was then 



The Game of the High Peaks 291 

unused. When I reached the farther side of the 
plain and was about entering the woods, I turned 
to look over the mountain once more, and my eye 
was immediately caught by two white objects 
which were moving along the terrace, about half 
a mile to one side of the lick. That they were 
goats was evident at a glance, their white bodies 
contrasting sharply with the green vegetation. 
They came along very rapidly, giving me no time 
to get back over the plain, and stopped for a 
short time at the lick, right in sight from where 
I was, although too far off for me to tell anything 
about their size. I think they smelt my foot- 
prints in the soil; at any rate they were very 
watchful, one of them always jumping up on a 
rock or fallen log to moimt guard when the other 
halted to browse. The sim had just set; it was 
impossible to advance across the open plain, 
which they scanned at every glance ; and to skirt 
it and climb up any other place than the pass 
down which I had come — itself a goat-trail — 
would have taken till long after nightfall. All 
that I could do was to stay where I was and 
watch them, imtil in the dark I slipped off un- 
observ-ed and made the best of my way to camp, 
resolved to hunt them up on the morrow. 

Shortly after noon next day we were at the 
terrace, having approached with the greatest 
caution, and only after a minute examination, 



292 Ranch Life 

with the field-glasses, of all the neighboring 
mountain. I wore moccasins, so as to make no 
noise. We soon found that one of the trails was 
evidently regularly traveled, probably every 
evening, and we determined to lie in wait by it, 
so as either to catch the animals as they came 
down to feed, or else to mark them if they got 
out on some open spot on the terraces where they 
could be stalked. As an ambush we chose a ledge 
in the cliff below a terrace, with, in front, a breast- 
work of the natural rock some five feet high. It 
was perhaps fifty yards from the trail. I hid 
myself on this ledge, having arranged on the rock 
breastwork a few pine branches through which to 
fire, and waited, hour after hour, continually 
scanning the moimtain carefully with the glasses. 
There was very little life. Occasionally a chick- 
aree or chipmunk scurried out from among the 
tnmks of the great pines to pick up the cones 
which he had previously bitten off from the upper 
branches; a noisy Clarke's crow clung for some 
time in the top of a hemlock; and occasionally 
flocks of cross-bill went by, with swift undulating 
flight and low calls. From time to time I peeped 
cautiously over the pine branches on the breast- 
work ; and the last time I did this I suddenly'- saw 
two goats, that had come noiselessly down, 
standing motionless directly opposite to me, their 
suspicions evidently aroused by something. I 



The Game of the High Peaks 293 

gently shoved the rifle over one of the boughs; 
the largest goat turned its head sharply round to 
look, as it stood quartering to me, and the bullet 
went fairly through the lungs. Both animals 
promptly ran off along the terrace, and I raced 
after them in my moccasins, skirting the edge of 
the cliff, where there were no trees or bushes. 
As I made no noise and could nm very swiftly on 
the bare cliff edge, I succeeded in coming out into 
the first little glade, or break, in the terrace at 
the same time that the goats did. The first to 
come out of the bushes was the big one I had 
shot at, an old she, as it turned out; while the 
other, a yearling ram, followed. The big one 
turned to look at me as she mounted a fallen tree 
that lay across a chasm-like rent in the terrace; 
the light red frothy blood covered her muzzle, 
and I paid no further heed to her as she slowly 
walked along the log, but bent my attention 
toward the yearling, which was galloping and 
scrambling up an almost perpendicular path that 
led across the face of the cliff above. Holdmg 
my rifle just over it, I fired, breaking the neck of 
the goat, and it rolled down some fifty or sixty 
yards, almost to where I stood. I then went 
after the old goat, which had lain down; as I 
approached she feebly tried to rise and show 
fight, but her strength was spent, her blood had 
ebbed away, and she fell back lifeless in the effort. 



294 Ranch Life 

They were both good specimens, the old one being 
unusually large, with fine horns. White goats are 
squat, heavy beasts ; not so tall as black-tail deer, 
but weighing more. 

Early next morning I came back with my two 
men to where the goats were lying, taking along 
the camera. Having taken their photographs and 
skinned them we went back to camp, hunted up 
the ponies and mules, who had been shifting for 
themselves during the past few days, packed up 
our tent, trophies, and other belongings, and set 
off for the settlements, well pleased with our trip. 

All moimtain game yields noble sport, because 
of the nerve, daring, and physical hardihood 
implied in its successful pursuit. The chase of 
the white goat involves extraordinary toil and 
some slight danger on account of the extreme 
roughness and inaccessibility of its haunts; but 
the beast itself is less shy than the mountain 
sheep. How the chase of either compares in 
difficulty with that of the various Old World 
mountain game it would be hard to say. Men 
who have tried both say that, though there is not 
in Europe the chance to try the adventurous, 
wandering life of the wilderness so beloved by the 
American hunter, yet when it comes to com- 
paring the actual chase of the game of the two 
worlds, it needs greater skill, both as cragsman 
and still-hunter, to kill ibex and chamois in the 



The Game of the High Peaks 295 

Alps or Pyrenees — by fair stalking I mean; for 
if they are driven to the guns, as is sometimes 
done, the sport is of a very inferior kind, not 
rising above the methods of killing white-tail in 
the Eastern States, or of driving deer in Scotland. 
I myself have had no experience of Old World 
mountaineering, beyond two perfectly conven- 
tional trips up the Matterhom and Jungfrau — on 
the latter, by the way, I saw three chamois a long 
way off. 

My brother has done a good deal of ibex, moim- 
tain sheep, and markhoor shooting in Cashmere 
and Thibet, and I suppose the sport to be had 
among the tremendous moimtain masses of the 
Himalayas must stand above all other kinds of 
hill shooting; yet, after all, it is hard to believe 
that it can yield much more pleasure than that 
felt by the American hunter when he follows the 
lordly elk and the grizzly among the timbered 
slopes of the Rockies, or the big-horn and the 
white-fleeced, jet-homed antelope-goat over their 
towering and barren peaks. 



i\OV i9 \3^:i 



l\OM 



^^ 1903 





LIBRARY OF CONGRESS 



013 903 543 4 



